Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialyatsky went on trial in Minsk on Thursday on charges of funding protests against the country’s authoritarian government; If convicted, he faces up to 12 years in prison.
The trial is part of a wider crackdown on the opposition by the government of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko.
Bialiatsky’s trial began with the handcuffed 60-year-old human rights activist seated in a cage in a courtroom surrounded by police officers along with two other defendants.
Beliatsky was awarded with Nobel Peace Prize in October, along with prominent Russian human rights organization Memorial and Ukrainian human rights watchdog Center for Civil Liberties. The founder of human rights watchdog Viasana was arrested in July 2021 and has been in jail since then.
The judge denied his request to remove the handcuffs and conduct the trial in Belarusian – one of the country’s official languages. The trial is open to the public but Western diplomats were not admitted.
All three pleaded innocent to the charges.
“Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Belarusian national hero Ales Bialiatsky must be very dangerous to the regime – he conducted 120 searches and collected 300 pages of material, a new record for a political case. But he’s only dangerous to those criminals.” who have usurped power from our people. Tweeted Opposition leader Svetlana Sikhanskaya, who is in exile and faces trial in absentia on January 17.
Her husband, Sergei, was a popular blogger aiming to challenge Lukashenko during the 2020 presidential election. Sentenced 18 years in jail from 2021 for spreading hatred and social unrest.
Tsikhanskaya said three trade union activists were sentenced on Thursday to between eight and nine years in prison.
Another exiled opposition leader, Pavel Latushko, is also being tried in absentia this month. Country’s Polish minority activist Andrzej Poczobut adds testing On 16 January. Next week, several freelance journalists it will also go on trial.
According to the Belarusian human rights watchdog, there are approximately 1,500 political prisoners in the country.
cozy with the kremlin
Lukashenko is trying to ensure that there is no return of the mass protests that threatened his grip on power in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 fake election.
“Repression in Belarus only got worse in the last year,” Tsikhanskaya Tweeted on Wednesday. “Trials in absentia, death sentences for attempted terrorism, thousands labeled as extremists, destruction and confiscation of property, and detention of relatives are only a small part of the regime’s terror machine.”
Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, has been trying to quell any opposition to his close alliance with Russia – one of his regime’s few friends.
Belarus has opened its airspace and military bases to Russia for use in its invasion of Ukraine, and trained thousands of newly mobilized Russian soldiers. However, Lukashenko has not sent his army into battle.
Ukraine’s Brigadier General Oleksiy Gromov said that despite having thousands of Russian troops in Belarus – and even in addition to the most effective Belarusian troops – is not enough to launch another offensive in northern Ukraine. a military briefing At the end of December.