The Supreme Court of Belarus has sentenced human rights defender and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison. Along with the head of the NGO Viasná, three other collaborators were sentenced to between seven and nine years in prison. The official charge they face for providing financial support to other opponents is “smuggling large sums of money” and “financing protests that seriously violate public order”.
Despite the threat hanging over the dissident after the suppression of demonstrations in 2020, Bialiatski, a member of the opposition platform Coordination Council of Belarus, decided to stay in his country, where he was arrested in 2021. Last December he was already sentenced in another case to 18 years in prison.
Bialiatski and his colleagues helped other activists with the costs of their court cases. According to prosecutors, the prisoners brought 248,000 euros from Lithuania into the country between 2016 and 2021. They did this legally, as they gradually brought this money into the country without exceeding the 10,000 euro cash customs limit allowed by Belarusian law. This money was used to pay for fines, lawyers and food for other Belarusian opponents in prison.
Indeed, in some of the country’s prisons, like the dreaded Okrestina, inmates are charged for food, according to a complaint from the newspaper Nóvaya Gazeta, whose director Dmitri Murátov received the Nobel Peace Prize a year before Bialiatski reported on Russian repression.
Judge Maryna Zapasnik has also sentenced Viasná Vice President Valiantsin Stefanovic to nine years in prison; seven years in prison for Uladzimir Labkovich, coordinator of the Human Rights Defenders for Free Protests campaign; and eight for activist Zmitser Salauyou, who was tried in absentia. Likewise, the Belarusian court has fined each of them 185,000 Belarusian rubles, almost 70,000 euros for it.
This is the third time that Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime sentenced Bialiatsky to prison. In addition to the 18-year prison sentence last December, the opponent was sentenced to four and a half years in prison in 2011 on charges of tax evasion. Three years later, in 2014, he was released thanks to international pressure.
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The NGO Viasná has been instrumental in showing the world the repression of the Belarusian regime, especially after the 2020 presidential elections, where the population denounced massive fraud. Lukashenko won 80% of the vote against 10% of the opposition, and the citizens’ peaceful protests were met with violence and mass arrests. According to the above NGO, there are currently 1,458 political prisoners in the country.
“These shameful repressive practices against human rights defenders require decisive action by key international actors,” Viasná claimed on the eve of the trial, in a statement signed by more than twenty international NGOs, including Human Rights Watch and the Helsinki Committee. For the signatories, the punishment was draconian “even by the miserable standards of the Belarusian judiciary”.
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