Explained | Why has Belarus jailed Nobel laureate Ales Bialiatski for 10 years?Premium

The Belarusian human rights advocate has been jailed twice before under authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko’s regime on charges that the international community has called politically motivated

The story so far: Jailed human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, the face of Belarus’s fight for democratic rights and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has been sentenced by a court in the capital Minsk to 10 years in prison on charges of smuggling cash and financing protests. Three of his colleagues from Viasna, Belarus’s most prominent human rights group, have also been handed jail sentences between seven to nine years in the same case. The United States and the European Union described the trial as a “sham”, while exiled Belarusian Opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya described the verdict as “appalling” and called for the activists to be freed.

Ales Bialiatski, 60, has been a human rights and pro-democracy activist since the 1980s, when Belarus was part of the erstwhile Soviet Union.

Born in 1962, Mr. Bialiatski graduated from Homiel State University in 1984 with a degree in Russian and Belarusian Philology. After working as a schoolteacher for a short period, he became a scholar of Belarusian literature and then started working at the Museum of History of Belarusian Literature. Later, he was elected the director of the Maksim Bahdanovich Literary Museum in Minsk, where he organised several exhibits of poltical and social importance. Mr. Bialiatski was also involved in multiple pro-democracy initiatives till Belarus gained independence from the USSR in 1990.

In 1994, Alexander Lukashenko was elected President in the country’s first (and what is considered its only) free election since independence. Mr. Lukashenko gradually began tightening his hold on the country’s administration and began to amend its Constitution. His rule has been described as “Europe’s last dictatorship”. In 1996, locals protested against Mr. Lukashenko’s rule in large numbers, in an uprising popularly called the Minsk Spring. The leader cracked down on dissent and several people were detained.

It was around this time that Mr. Bialiatski began campaigning for human rights and set up Viasna-96, named after the Belarusian word for “spring”, with the aim of helping arrested political protesters and their families by providing financial and legal assistance. The organisation was later christened the Viasna Human Rights Center and was registered as a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in 1999. Viasna also began documenting abuses against prisoners by the Lukashenko administration, and continues to keep a record of every political prisoner to date— including its founder. ​​

Mr. Bialiatski also served as the vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), one of the oldest international human rights organisations, between 2007 and 2016.

Mr. Bialiatski has received many accolades for his work including the Right Livelihood Award, nicknamed the alternative Nobel, in 2020. He had been nominated thrice before for the Nobel Peace Prize—in 2006, 2007, and 2012— before receiving it last year. “Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr. Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus,” the Nobel Committee said while awarding him the prize.