the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize goes to Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian lawyer and activist imprisoned for his fight for human rights. The Scandinavian jury also rewarded the Russian organization for the defense of human rights Memorial – founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, whom Putin dissolved – and the Ukrainian association for the defense of human rights Center for Civil Liberties.
The Nobel Peace Prize to the dissident Bialiatski and the organizations Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties is in honor of “commitment to human rights and the right to criticize power”, it reads in the motivations of the Nobel committee in Oslo. The reasons for the Nobel Prize include the commitment to “defend the rights of citizens, for the rights of citizens and against the abuse of power.” And to document war crimes.” The Nobel committee has officially asked Belarus to release dissident Ales Bialiatski, President Berit Reiss-Andersen told a news conference.
Who is the Nobel laureate
Ales Bialiatski has been leading a campaign for democracy and freedom in Belarus for 30 years, underlines the site Gariwo – Les jardins des Justes. In 1996, the new Nobel laureate founded the Viasna Center for Human Rights, based in Minsk, the country’s capital, to provide support to political prisoners. Since then, the center has become the main NGO in Belarus, a country governed by a post-Soviet dictatorship led by Alexander Lukashenko. The activities of Bialiatski and his center aim to promote democracy, the documentation of human rights violations and the observation of elections.
Stopped
Since the mid-1980s, the new Nobel laureate has led a nonviolent, nonpartisan campaign to secure democratic freedoms in Belarus. His activity as a member of the national human rights movement cost him several times his arrest. Ales Bialiatski suffered more than 25 arrests and served years in prison for orchestrated charges against him. Despite this, he never ceased to devote himself to the promotion of democratic principles and human rights in Belarus. After the 2020 presidential elections, again fraudulently won by Lukashenko, Bialiatsky became a member of the Coordinating Council. This is an institution involving members of the opposition to the dictatorial regime, which includes personalities from Belarusian civil society.
Belarusian justice has once again arrested the new Nobel Prize winner on July 14, for “tax evasion”, condemning him to the maximum sentence: 7 years in prison. Ten years earlier, in 2011, Ales Bialiatski had been sentenced for the same crime to 4 and a half years in prison. He had served three before being granted amnesty, under severe restrictions and long periods of solitary confinement. On that occasion, independent observers and international organizations strongly condemned his detention in retaliation for his work in favor of human rights.
What is Memorial
The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation definitively liquidated, on February 28, 2022, the historical-educational association Memorial, born in 1989 at the time of glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring) triggered by the new course Gorbachev’s policy. Memorial has investigated Stalinist repressions and the crimes of the Soviet totalitarian dictatorship for three decades. Its human rights center investigated violations and abuses in Russia Today. Especially with regard to what happened during the two wars in Chechnya (1994-1996 and 1999-2009): summary executions, rapes, kidnappings, ethnic cleansing. But from 2013-2016 the Russian authorities decreed that Memorial is a “foreign agent”. The organization is now officially terminated.
