By YURAS KARMANAU (Associated Press)
TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — A courtroom on Friday sentenced Belarus’ prime human rights advocate and one of many winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, to 10 years in jail.
The harsh punishment of Ales Bialiatski and three of his colleagues got here in response to huge protests over a 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a brand new time period in workplace.
Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who backed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, has dominated the ex-Soviet nation with an iron fist since 1994. More than 35,000 folks have been arrested, and 1000’s have been overwhelmed by police, in a brutal crackdown he unleashed on the protesters, the biggest within the nation’s historical past.
Belarus stands as an outlier in its help of the year-old Russian invasion, with different international locations within the area not backing Moscow publicly.
Bialiatski and his cohorts on the Viasna human rights heart he based have 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.
During the trial, which happened behind closed doorways, the 60-year-old Bialiatski and his colleagues have 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 information company Belta, Bialiatksi, clad in black garments, appeared wan, however calm.
Viasna mentioned after the decision that each one 4 activists have maintained their innocence.
In his last deal with to the courtroom, he urged the authorities to “stop the civil war in Belarus.” Bialiatski mentioned it grew to become apparent to him from the case information 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 sentence handed to Bialiatski and his colleagues elicited outrage within the West.
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a nongovernmental group working to make sure that human rights are revered in follow, mentioned 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 in opposition to the oppression and injustice,” Secretary General Berit Lindeman mentioned in an announcement.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock mentioned in a tweet that the proceedings in opposition to the activists “were a farce.”
“The Minsk regime is fighting civil society with force and prison,” she added. “This is just as much a daily disgrace as Lukashenko’s support for Putin’s war. We call for the end of political persecution and freedom for the more than 1,400 political prisoners.”
Bialiatski is the fourth particular person within the 121-year historical past of the Nobel Prizes to obtain the award whereas in jail or detention.
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Associated Press writers Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this story.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”