Nobel Laurette, Ales Bialiatski Sentenced To 10-Year Jail Term

• Belarusian Nobel Prize winner, Ales Bialiatski has bagged a 10 year jail term over smuggling charges.

• The charges however has been criticized by the German government for being an attack on civil society.

• The Germany Foreign Minister believes the charges were brought against the Nobel Laurette for political reasons motivated by his previous activism against the Belarusian government.

EKO HOT BLOG reports that Belarusian Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski has been sentenced to 10 years in a maximum-security prison by a court in Minsk, according to Russia’s state news agency TASS. Bialiatski was found guilty of smuggling.

The German government has called the 10-year prison term an attack on civil society by the Minsk government.

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German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock slammed the charges against Bialiatski and his co-defendants Valentin Stefanovich and Vladimir Labkovich as a “farce,” saying they were being judged “simply because of their years-long fight for the rights, dignity, and freedom of people in Belarus.”

Baerbock added that the Belarusian regime was fighting civil society with violence and imprisonment, which was as much a daily disgrace as Lukashenko’s support for Putin’s war in Ukraine. She urged Belarus to end political persecution and demanded the release of all over 1,400 political prisoners.

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya also slammed the sentencing of Bialiatski and other activists in the same trial as “appalling.” She called for everything to be done to fight against this “shameful injustice” and to free them.

Bialiatski is a pro-democracy activist who has documented human rights abuses in Belarus since the 1980s. He founded the organization Viasna in 1996 after a referendum that consolidated the authoritarian powers of President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russia. Bialiatski was arrested in 2020 amid widespread protests against Lukashenko’s regime.

Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 alongside human rights groups from Russia and Ukraine.

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The laureates were honored for their outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses, and the abuse of power in their respective countries. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said at the time that they had promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens for many years.

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