The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded last year alongside human rights activists from three countries – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – who championed the right to criticize power and posed a challenge to President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression.
The awards go to Memorial, a Russian organization; the Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine; and Ales Bialiatski, an imprisoned Belarusian activist; were not without controversy. Although many Ukrainians were pleased to receive the Center for Civil Liberties award, some saw the shared honor as confirmation of Putin’s narrative that Russia and Ukraine are “brotherly nations.”
Others saw the award as supporting cross-border resistance against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The winners “have been championing the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens for many years,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, at last year’s ceremony.
Here is a closer look at the Nobel Prize winners of 2022:
Civil Liberties Center
The Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, founded in 2007, had been documenting human rights violations and war crimes in Ukraine years before Russia’s full-scale invasion last year.
Oleksandra Matviychuk, director of the Center for Civil Liberties, spoke at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo last year. Photo credit: Pool photo by Javad Parsa
When Russia violently occupied Crimea in 2014, the group documented the disappearances of activists, journalists and dissidents. Since last year, this work has expanded as the group works with national and international groups to continue to document Russian war crimes against Ukrainians.
The group relaunched its Euromaidan SOS project last year, with several hundred volunteers collecting on-site testimonies about human rights abuses. The project was first launched following protests in 2013 and 2014 in Kiev’s Maidan Square to monitor abuses by the security forces of the country’s then-president Viktor Yanukovych.
The organization has also advocated for Ukraine to join the International Criminal Court. It is still not a full member, but Ukraine has accepted the court’s jurisdiction over crimes on its territory since 2013.
monument
Memorial, a Russian human rights group founded in 1988, spent decades educating the Russian public about the Soviet Union’s political repression by publishing history books, hosting exhibitions and educating schoolchildren.
But as President Vladimir V. Putin cracks down on dissident speech, Memorial’s search for truths about Russia’s history does not go unpunished.
The group was banned by the Russian government a year before the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded. And last year, on the day the awards were announced, members of Memorial fought in court to retain their final offices in Moscow after their dissolution the year before; As expected, the judge ruled against her.
Jan Rachinsky, a member of Memorial, signed the Nobel Committee’s guest book in Oslo last year. Photo credit: Haakon Mosvold Larsen/NTB, via Portal
It was the second year in a row that the Nobel Prize was awarded to a Russian. One of the 2021 honorees was Dmitri A. Muratov, the editor of the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Six of his journalists were murdered.
Ales Bialiatski
Mr. Bialiatski, the 61-year-old Belarusian laureate, was active in human rights movements even before Belarus gained independence from Soviet control. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the coming to power of Belarusian authoritarian leader Aleksandr G. Lukashenko in 1994, Mr. Bialiatski founded another human rights group called Viasna, or Spring.
He was arrested after testifying on behalf of another activist and was soon tried himself on trumped-up charges of tax evasion. After serving a four-and-a-half year prison sentence, he was released under an amnesty in 2014.
Now he has been detained without formal charges and is being investigated along with other members of Viasna, one of many targets for dissident speech following protests in 2020 following a landslide victory by Mr Lukashenko in an election widely seen as rigged.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry ridiculed the award in a post on X, formerly Twitter, He wrote that the awards had become so politicized that Alfred Nobel was “turning in his grave.”