MOSCOW (Reuters) – Belarusian Ales Bialiatski, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was sentenced in his country on Friday to ten years in prison, a sentence described as a “tragedy” by the president of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Ales Bialiatski, 60, a democracy activist and founder of the Belarusian human rights organization Viasna, was convicted of financing protests and tax evasion, according to the official Belarusian news agency Belta.
Arrested in 2021, he denied the charges against him, saying he was being prosecuted for political reasons.
“This file, this verdict against him, is a personal tragedy for him. (…) We regret that he must continue his fight in prison”, declared the president of the Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, deploring her also accusations motivated by political interests.
Belarusian opponent in exile Svetlana Tsikhanovskaïa denounced the “appalling” conviction of Bialiatski and other defendants during the same trial. “We must do everything to fight this shameful injustice and free them,” she wrote on Twitter.
Human rights groups say around 1,500 political opponents are believed to be jailed in Belarus, most of whom were arrested after the 2020 crackdown on protests following President Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election in an election deemed rigged by the government. opposition and Western countries.
“This sentence once again bears witness to the unprecedented policy of repression carried out by the Belarusian authorities against the peaceful protest movement that emerged following the fraudulent ballot for the presidential election of August 9, 2020, as well as ‘against any critical voice of the Belarusian power,’ reacted the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in a press release.
(Reuters report, French version Matthieu Protard, edited by Kate Entringer and Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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