human rights group from Russia and Ukraine – Memorial and Center for Civil Liberties – has been officially awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 along with jailed Belarusian lawyer Ales Bialitsky at a ceremony in Oslo on Saturday.
Beliatsky’s wife received the award on his behalf. The three winners will share the prize money of 10,000,000 Swedish krona ($900,000).
The new laureates were honored for their “outstanding efforts to document war crimes, human rights abuses and abuses of power” in their respective countries.
“He has for many years promoted the right to criticize the authorities and protect the fundamental rights of citizens,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said in a statement in October.
The Russian laureate denounced the Battle of Moscow: Russian Nobel Peace Prize winner Yan Rachinsky condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” war on Ukraine in his acceptance speech.
Rachinsky, of the human rights organization Memorial of Russia, claimed that Russia’s resistance under Putin has been referred to as “fascism”, adding that “it has become the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war against Ukraine.”
Memorial, one of Russia’s best-known and respected human rights groups, worked to highlight Stalinist-era abuses and atrocities for more than three decades before it was ordered to close by the country’s Supreme Court late last year. worked for
Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matveichuk on Saturday called for an international tribunal to bring Putin and Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko to justice over “war crimes”.
The Center for Civil Liberties in Matvichuk, Ukraine, said it would be a way to “ensure justice for those affected by the war”.
In his acceptance speech, Matveichuk warned that war criminals should not only be convicted after the fall of an authoritarian regime, saying that “justice cannot wait.”