Belarus
Ales Bialiatski has been in prison for 20 months following mass protests against Alexander Lukashenko’s regime
AP in Tallinn
Wed 24 May 2023 at 8:25pm BST
Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski has been transferred to a notoriously brutal prison in Belarus, from which nothing has been heard for a month, his wife said.
Natalia Pinchuk said that Bialiatski, who is serving a 10-year sentence, has been under information blackout since his transfer to the N9 repeat offender colony in the city of Gorky, where inmates are beaten and subjected to hard labour.
“Authorities are creating intolerable conditions for Ales and keeping him in strict information isolation. “There hasn’t been a single letter from him for a month and he hasn’t received any of my letters,” Pinchuk said on Wednesday.
In March, a court convicted 60-year-old Bialiatski – Belarus’ leading human rights activist and one of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureates – and three of his colleagues for financing acts contrary to public order and smuggling.
It was the latest step in crackdowns on dissidents in the country since 2020.
Bialiatski has spent 20 months behind bars since his arrest in 2021 and Pinchuk fears his health is deteriorating.
Nobel laureates call for the release of Belarusian peace prize winner Ales Bialiatski
“In the last few letters, I see how his writing has changed and I see things getting worse for him, both in terms of his health and his eyesight, and I’m really, really concerned about that,” she said . She called on the UN to intervene.
The harsh punishment of Bialiatski and three of his colleagues came in response to massive protests against an election in 2020 that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko another term in office.
Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who backed the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has ruled the country with an iron fist since 1994. More than 35,000 people were arrested in the 2020 protests, the largest protests ever in Belarus. and thousands were beaten by the police.
All four activists have protested their innocence, according to the Viasna human rights center founded by Bialiatski. He shared the 2022 Peace Prize with Memorial, a prominent Russian human rights group, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
Viasna has so far counted 1,516 political prisoners in Belarus. Human rights activists say the authorities are deliberately creating intolerable conditions for many of them.
For 28 days there has been no information on the fate of detained former presidential candidate Viktar Babaryka, who was reportedly beaten in his cell and taken to a hospital. For 100 days no one has heard from Nikolai Statkevich, a prominent opposition figure who is serving a 14-year prison sentence.
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