Nobel Peace Prize awarded to anti-authoritarian activists

Belgium (Brussels Morning Newspaper) The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded on Friday the Nobel Peace Prize to a jailed Belarus activist and two rights groups from Russia and Ukraine, in a move widely perceived as condemning the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Belarus counterpart, Alexander Lukashenko.

The Norwegian Committee announced the 2022 award will be given to Belarus civic leader Ales Bialiatski, Russian rights group Memorial and the Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties. “The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to honour three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence in the neighbour countries Belarus, Russia and Ukraine,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, Committee chair.

Bialiatski, a former vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), joined the opposition’s Coordination Council following the sham 2020 presidential elections. He was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to seven years in prison for tax evasion, a charge considered to be politically motivated by most western countries and international rights groups. 

While announcing the award winners, Reiss-Andersen called on Belarus to release Bialiatski from prison. No state media reported on the award in Belarus.

The Russian group Memorial was initially founded near the end of the Soviet Union with the goal of helping the victims of political repression. In later years, the group documented the crimes against humanity of the Stalinist regime, while at the same time labouring on protecting the human rights in the conflict zones in or around the territory of post-Soviet Russia.

Late last year, it was dissolved by Russian courts for allegedly breaching the law requiring civil society groups who receive foreign funding to register themselves as “foreign agents”, a part of a wider crackdown on independent media and citizen activists in Russia in the buildup to the invasion of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Centre for Civil Liberties is an organisation which worked on making Ukraine more democratic, to improve public control of law enforcement and the judiciary, increase public transparency and reduce corruption. Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the organisation has helped the authorities in documenting numerous Russian war crimes committed during the invasion.