Nobel Peace Prize winner handed 10-year prison sentence in Belarus – National | 24CA News
A Belarusian courtroom on Friday sentenced Ales Bialiatski, Belarus’ high human rights advocate and one of many winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, to 10 years in jail.
Bialiatski and three different high figures of the Viasna human rights heart he based had been convicted of financing actions violating public order and smuggling, Viasna reported Friday.
Valiantsin Stefanovich was given a nine-year sentence; Uladzimir Labkovicz seven years; and Dzmitry Salauyou was sentenced to eight years in jail in absentia.
Bialiatski and two of his associates had been arrested and jailed after large protests over a 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a brand new time period in workplace. Salauyou managed to depart Belarus earlier than he was arrested.
Lukashenko, who has dominated the ex-Soviet nation with an iron fist since 1994, unleashed a brutal crackdown on the protesters, the biggest within the nation’s historical past. More than 35,000 individuals had been arrested, and 1000’s had been overwhelmed by police.
During the trial, which befell behind closed doorways, the 60-year-old Bialiatski and his colleagues had been held in a caged enclosure within the courtroom. They have spent 21 months behind bars for the reason that arrest.
In the images from the courtroom launched Friday by Belarus’ state news company Belta, Bialiatksi, clad in black garments, regarded wan, however calm.
Viasna stated after the decision that each one 4 activists have maintained their innocence.
In his ultimate handle to the courtroom, he urged the authorities to “stop the civil war in Belarus.” Bialiatski stated it turned apparent to him from the case recordsdata that “the investigators were fulfilling the task they were given: to deprive Viasna human rights advocates of freedom at any cost, destroy Viasna and stop our work.”
Exiled Belarusian opposition chief Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya denounced the courtroom verdict on Friday as “appalling.” “We must do everything to fight against this shameful injustice (and) free them,” Tsikhaouskaya wrote in a tweet.
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a non-governmental group working to make sure that human rights are revered in follow, stated that it was “shocked by the cynicism behind the sentences that were just issued to our Belarusian friends in Minsk.”
”The trial reveals how Lukashenka’s regime punishes our colleagues, human rights defenders, for standing up towards the oppression and injustice,“ Secretary General Berit Lindeman stated in an announcement.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
