A Minsk court sentenced activist Ales Bialiatski, co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize and key figure in the democratic movement in Belarus, to 10 years in prison on Friday, his NGO said.
In a press release, the Viasna organization specifies that two collaborators of Mr. Bialiatski, arrested like him in July 2021 and tried alongside him, Valentin Stefanovitch and Vladimir Labkovitch, were sentenced respectively to nine and seven years in prison.
A fourth defendant, Dmitri Soloviev, tried in absentia after fleeing to Poland, received an eight-year prison sentence. They were also all fined 185,000 Belarusian rubles (approximately 100,000 Canadian dollars).
This heavy verdict is part of a new series of trials targeting activists, journalists and opponents, relentlessly repressed since the protest movement in the summer of 2020.
These protests, triggered after the controversial re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko, accused of massive fraud, have been put down with thousands of arrests, cases of torture, several deaths of demonstrators, heavy sentences and forced exiles.
Last fall, Mr. Bialiatski, whose name is sometimes spelled Beliatski, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with two other human rights organizations, Memorial (Russia) and the Center for Civil Liberties (Ukraine) .
The 60-year-old activist founded and led for years Viasna, the main human rights group in this authoritarian regime led since 1994 by the indestructible Mr. Lukashenko.
During the 2020 protesters, the NGO Viasna had played a key role in documenting the crackdowns and arrests targeting protesters.
“Shameful injustice”
Ales Bialiatski and his colleagues are accused of having brought large quantities of cash into Belarus and of having financed collective actions “greatly undermining public order”.
After the verdict, the main opponent in exile, Svetlana Tikhanovskaïa, denounced a “shameful injustice”.
All three men had pleaded not guilty. During the hearings and at the verdict, they were forced to wear handcuffs, the court having refused to have them removed.
Ales Bialiatski had already spent nearly three years in prison in Belarus, between 2011 and 2014, after being convicted in another case denounced as political.
Belarus had 1,461 political prisoners as of 1er March, according to Viasna.
Westerners passed several rounds of sanctions against Minsk for the crackdown on the 2020 protests, but the regime still enjoys Moscow’s unwavering support.
Belarus has agreed in return to serve as a rear base for Russian troops to attack Ukraine in February 2022. But the Belarusian army has not taken a direct part in the fighting so far.
Chain trial
In addition to Viasna’s trial, others are currently targeting activists in the democracy movement in Belarus.
The figure of the opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaïa, in exile, as well as several of her collaborators, are currently tried in absentia.
Several journalists from the Tut.by website, the main independent media in Belarus, who remained in the country and were imprisoned, are also on trial. They are accused in particular of tax evasion and incitement to hatred and risk very heavy penalties.
In February, a Belarusian-Polish journalist and activist Andrzej Poczobut was sentenced to eight years in prison, sparking protests in Warsaw.
The trial of the three founders of the opposition media Nexta, which played an important role in the 2020 challenge, also opened in mid-February.
Two of them are on trial in absentia, the third, Roman Protassevich, was forcibly brought back to Belarus in May 2021, after an airliner on which he was traveling was hijacked to Minsk.
Mr. Protassevitch agreed to cooperate with the authorities, while his partner, Sofia Sapega, who had been arrested with him, was sentenced to six years in prison.