A Belarusian court on Friday sentenced 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Viasna human rights center Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
Judge Marina Zapasnik found Bialiatski and three other human rights activists guilty of smuggling an organized group and financing collective actions that seriously undermine public order. For this reason, she imposed 7 to 10 years in prison on the four defenders of Viasna, according to the NGO.
Bialiatski, the country's most prominent pro-democracy activist, has claimed that he is being persecuted for political reasons.
On the eve of the sentence against Bialiuatski, the UN special rapporteur for Belarus, Anais Marin, warned that the human rights situation in the country is worsening "considerably".
This expert will present in the next few days a report on the human rights violations committed in the country in the context of the presidential elections about three years ago.
Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, won a sixth term in the August 2020 elections, highly criticized by the international community and the opposition, who considered them fraudulent. Since then, he has exercised a repression that has been increasing against all forms of political opposition and criticism of civil society.
According to the expert, there are currently "at least 1,400" political prisoners in Belarus, and more than 700 civil society organizations have been forced to close their offices in the last three years. At least 32 journalists and media workers are currently detained in the country.
A clear example of this repression is the verdict expected on Friday in the trial against Bialiatski. The activist and his collaborators, Valentin Stefanovich and Vladimir Labkovich, each faced a sentence of up to 12 years in prison.
"It's a great tragedy," Natalia Satsunckevich, from Viasna, who attended Thursday's meeting in Geneva, told AFP. “They are behind bars just because they helped other people to exercise their rights. They did not commit any crime,” she said.
More than 20 human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, issued a statement Thursday denouncing the criminal charges against the three men and calling on the Belarusian authorities to "immediately and unconditionally release them."
