March 3, 2023 at 10:04 GMT
Updated 3 minutes ago
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Ales Bialiatski pictured in November 2021
A court in Belarus has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to ten years in prison.
He was convicted of smuggling and financing “acts that grossly violate public order,” rights group Viasna said.
Supporters of Mr Bialiatski, 60, say the authoritarian regime of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko is trying to silence him.
Mr. Bialiatski was one of three winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Bialiatski was in court along with two fellow campaigners, Valentin Stefanovich and Vladimir Labkovich.
Mr Stefanovich was sentenced to nine years in prison, while Mr Labkovich was sentenced to seven years in prison, according to Viasna, the group founded by Mr Bialiatski in 1996.
All three had pleaded not guilty.
Mr Bialiatski’s wife, Natalya Pinchuk, said the trial was “obviously directed against human rights defenders for their human rights work” and described it as a “cruel” verdict.
Referring to her husband’s letters from the prison where he has been held since his arrest, she said: “He always writes that everything is fine. He doesn’t complain about his health – he tries not to upset me.”
Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya said the conviction was “simply appalling”.
“We must do everything we can to fight against and liberate this shameful injustice,” she said.
Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called the charges a “farce” and said the trio were being “simply punished for their years of fighting for the rights, dignity and freedom of the people of Belarus”.
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the sentence was “another scandalous decision by the Belarusian court in recent times” and posted a Facebook post calling for the release of the “wrongly convicted man”.
His comments mark Poland’s recent condemnation of the Belarusian judiciary. Poland expelled the Belarusian defense attaché from the country last month following the trial and imprisonment of Belarusian-Polish journalist Andrzej Poczobut.
According to Viasna, there are currently 1,458 political prisoners in Belarus. Authorities claim there are none.
At the presentation of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize to Mr Bialiatski, Berit Reiss-Anderson, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said the Belarusian government had “tried to silence him for years”.
“He was harassed, arrested and jailed and stripped of his job,” she said.
Mr. Bialiatski is a veteran of the human rights movement in Belarus and founded Viasna in 1996 in response to the brutal crackdown on street protests that year by Mr. Lukashenko, who has been President of Belarus since the office was established in 1994.
He was sentenced to three years in prison in 2011 after being convicted of tax evasion, which he denied.
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WATCH: Highlights of the Belarusian leader’s exclusive interview with the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in 2021.
Mr Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been dubbed Europe’s last dictator.
Increasingly dependent on Moscow for economic, political and military support, it has absorbed Russian forces and allowed them to use Belarus as a base for their invasion of Ukraine.