Ales Bialiatski (60), who was awarded the Nobel prize in October, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday.
Reuters
London,UPDATED: Mar 3, 2023
Human rights activist Ales Bialiatski. (Image: Reuters)
By Reuters: Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights activist Ales Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday by a court in his native Belarus which found him guilty of financing protests in a trial condemned by the European Union as a "sham".
Bialiatski, 60, was awarded the Nobel prize in October for his work promoting human rights and democracy in a country which President Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Russia, has ruled with an iron hand for nearly 30 years, violently locking up his opponents or forcing them to flee.
Footage from the cramped Minsk court showed Bialiatski, who co-founded the Viasna (Spring) human rights group, looking sombre, his hands cuffed behind his back, as he and his co-defendants watched proceedings from a courtroom cage.
Bialiatski, who was arrested in 2021, and three co-defendants were charged with financing protests and smuggling money. Belarusian state news agency Belta confirmed the court had handed down long jail sentences to all the men, including a decade in prison for Bialiatski. He denied the charges against him, saying they were politically motivated.
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said Bialiatski and the three other activists had been unfairly convicted, describing the court verdict as "appalling".
EU cries 'sham' as Belarus jails Nobel winner until 2033
Belarus' jailing of a Nobel-prize winning activist was a "fake" verdict in a "sham trial", the EU's top diplomat has said, amid threats of further sanctions.
The EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell spoke out a few hours after a Minsk court sentenced a hand-cuffed and dejected-looking Ales Bialiatski to most of the rest of his life in prison on Friday (3 March).
The 60-year old won a Nobel prize in absentia last year for his work as chairman of the Viasna Human Rights Centre.
But this was not enough to shield him from a 10-year sentence on charges of financing protests and smuggling money into Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko's domain.
Belarus also jailed three other human-rights defenders for between seven and nine years the same day "on fake and politically-motivated charges", Borrell noted.
"The European Union condemns in the strongest possible terms their sham trials that are yet another appalling example of the Lukashenko regime trying to silence those who stand up in defence of human rights," he added.
Lukashenko is holding "more than 1,450" political prisoners in his dungeons, according to Borrell's reckoning.
Reports of conditions inside involve multiple cases of torture and sexual violence.
"The EU stands ready to react to repression and human rights abuses by the regime against its population," Borrell added on Friday, in a threat of further sanctions.
The verdict was a "farce", German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock echoed.
"The Minsk regime is fighting civil society with violence and imprisonment. This is as much a daily disgrace as Lukashenko's support for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's war [in Ukraine]," she said.
The EU blacklisted Lukashenko and 194 other individuals after his crackdown on protests following rigged elections in 2021.
It blacklisted 22 more and imposed trade and financial sanctions last year over Lukashenko's support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
But some of Lukashenko's relatives, such as his daughter-in-law Anna Lukashenko are still free to travel and live lavish lifestyles in the EU.
And the EU spared Belarus in its latest rounds of Russia sanctions, despite calls by the Belarusian government-in-exile in Lithuania to do more.
Bialiatski began his activism with anti-Soviet protests in the 1980s.
He already spent four years in Lukashenko's prisons between 2011 and 2014 on tax-evasion charges.
"I think there is an opportunity [for political change] after my release and I think I have to use the momentum," he told EUobserver in an interview at the time.
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said on Friday: "We must do everything to fight against this shameful injustice and free them [Bialiatski and the other three people jailed this week]".
"The case, the verdict against him [Bialiatski], is a tragedy for him personally," Berit Reiss-Andersen, leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, told the Reuters news agency.
"It also shows that the regime in Belarus does not tolerate freedom of expression and opposition," she said.
Belarus: Sentencing of human rights
defenders a ‘blatant retaliation’ for their work
Responding to the sentencing of founder and chair of Viasna human rights centre and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, who received a sentence of ten years in prison, his colleague Valiantsin Stefanovich, deputy chair of Viasna and vice-president of the International Federation of Human Rights, who was sentenced to nine years, and Viasna’s lawyer Uladzimir Labkovich, who was given seven years in prison, Marie Struthers, Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia said:
“This sham trial on politically motivated charges is a blatant retaliation for Viasna’s human rights work. Their sentencing represents a further blow to the already severely repressed civil society and the concerning state of human rights in Belarus. It’s a vindictive act of injustice that requires the immediate attention of the international community.
“These brave human rights defenders were never given the chance of a fair trial. They were handcuffed when escorted in and held inside a cage throughout the trial. The judge conducted proceedings in Russian instead of Belarusian and they were given no time to familiarize themselves with the case materials, to say nothing of them being tried on fabricated charges. We cannot let them suffer under the reprehensible political agenda of the Belarusian authorities. We demand their immediate and unconditional release.”
Background
Bialiatski Stefanovich and Labkovich, have been falsely charged with “smuggling large sums of money and financing group activities that grossly violated public order”. They have all been held in custody since July 2021, while exiled co-defendant Dzmitry Salauyou was sentenced to eight years in absentia.
The prosecution claims that they smuggled at least 201,000 Euros and 54,000 US Dollars across the border and used these funds to finance “unlawful” protest activities.
During and after mass and overwhelmingly peaceful protests against widely alleged electoral fraud in 2020, Viasna was instrumental in documenting and reporting widespread human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and other ill-treatment and unfair trials.
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