Ales Bialiatski during his trial in Minsk, January 5, 2023. VITALY PIVOVARCHIK / AFP
A court in Minsk on Friday, March 3, sentenced activist Ales Bialiatski, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and key figure in the democratic movement in Belarus, to 10 years in prison, his NGO reported in a press release. The Viasna organization states that two of Mr Bialiatski’s co-defendants, Valentin Stefanovitch and Vladimir Labkovitch, who were detained and tried with him, were sentenced to nine and seven years in prison respectively.
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Ales Bialiatski and his colleagues are accused of bringing large amounts of cash into Belarus and financing collective actions that “significantly undermine public order”. All three men had pleaded not guilty. A fourth defendant, Dmitry Solovyov, who was tried in absentia after fleeing to Poland, was sentenced to eight years in prison. All were also fined 185,000 Belarusian rubles ($70,000). Mr Bialiatski had already spent almost three years in prison between 2011 and 2014 after being convicted in another case denounced as political.
“Shameful Injustice”
This heavy sentence is part of a new series of trials against activists, journalists and opponents who have been repressed since the summer 2020 protest movement against power. These protests, sparked after the controversial re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko, who is accused of massive fraud, have been severely repressed, resulting in thousands of arrests, torture, multiple deaths of protesters, severe convictions and forced exiles. According to Viasna, as of March 1, the country had 1,461 political prisoners.
In the fall of 2022, Mr. Bialiatski received the Nobel Peace Prize along with two other human rights organizations, Memorial (Russia) and the Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine). The 60-year-old activist founded and for years ran Viasna, the main human rights group in this authoritarian regime led by Mr Lukashenko since 1994. During the 2020 protests, the NGO had played a key role in documenting raids and arrests.
In addition to Viasna, other trials are directed against activists in the democracy movement in Belarus. Among them: the opposition figure in exile Svetlana Tsikhanovskaia – who denounced a “shameful injustice” in the Bialiatski affair – and several of his associates, but also several journalists jailed by the website Tut.by, the country’s main independent media outlet .
Rear base of Mosou
The trial against the three founders of the opposition medium Nexta, which also played an important role in Challenge 2020, opened in mid-February. Two of them are on trial in absentia, the third, Roman Protassevich, was forcibly returned to Belarus in May 2021 after a plane he was traveling to Minsk on was hijacked. Mr Protassevitch agreed to cooperate with authorities while his partner Sofia Sapega, who had been arrested with him, was sentenced to six years in prison. In February, Belarusian-Polish journalist and activist Andrzej Poczobut was sentenced to eight years in prison, sparking protests from Warsaw.
Westerners have passed several rounds of sanctions against Minsk over the crackdown on the 2020 protests, but the regime still enjoys Moscow’s unwavering support. It has agreed to serve as a base for Russian troops to attack Ukraine in February 2022, but its army has so far not directly engaged in the fighting.