Belarusian human rights activis Ales Bialiatski speaks after he and the Belarusian human rights organization Vjasna were awarded the 2020 Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm on December 3, 2020.
Anders Wiklund | Afp | Getty Images
Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organization Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties have been awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Bialiatski, 60, helped spark the democracy movement that began in Belarus within the Nineteen Eighties. He has been in prison since 2021 on a charge of tax evasion widely considered to be politically motivated. He served a jail sentence from October 2011 to June 2014 on the identical charge and has been arrested multiple times.
The Nobel committee said he had “devoted his life to promoting democracy and peaceful development in his home country.”
The Center for Civil Liberties was arrange in 2007 to support Ukrainian civil society, promote human rights and campaign for full democracy within the country.
“After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the middle has engaged in efforts to discover and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian population,” the committee said.
“The middle is playing a pioneering role in holding guilty parties accountable for his or her crimes.”
The ultimate recipient, Russian rights group Memorial, was founded in 1987 in the previous Soviet Union to honor victims of political oppression.
In a news conference, Nobel Committee Chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said the prize was “not addressing [Russian] President Putin … except that his government, as with the federal government in Belarus, is representing an authoritarian government that’s suppressing human rights activists.”Â
She also called for Bialiatski to be released from prison.
Bialiatski’s campaign group, Viasna, has documented and spoken out against using torture on political prisoners in Belarus.
Alexander Lukashenko has been president of Belarus since 1994, when the country established a latest structure following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Bialiatski was arrested after widespread protests against Lukashenko’s regime in 2020 and 2021, which were met with a violent crackdown and 1000’s of arrests.
Belarus is Russia’s only European ally following its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and has also faced Western sanctions.
The Nobel Peace Prize is considered one of six awards given every year since 1901 by a five-person committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. It is meant to acknowledge those that have “conferred the best profit to humankind.”
It shouldn’t be the primary time it has been awarded to several recipients. In 2021, the peace prize was split between journalists Maria Ressa, co-founder of Philippine news site Rappler, and Dmitry Muratov, a Russian reporter. Each have worked to show corruption and authoritarianism and spoken out in defense of free speech.
This yr, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to French creator Annie Ernaux.
Inside the sciences, the prize for physics went to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for “pioneering quantum information science”; the prize for chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for work in “click” chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry; and the prize for medicine went to Svante Paabo for decoding the genome of Neanderthals.
The economics prize will likely be announced Monday.
