Belarus court jails Nobel Peace Prize winner Bialiatski 10 years
By Christian George
A court in Belarus has sentenced a Nobel Peace Prize winner Bialiatski for 10 years imprisonment for financing protests and other crimes.
The court made the pronouncement on Friday .
He was arrested in 2021 along with two co-workers from Viasna.
According to Reuters, an exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said Bialiatski and other activists sentenced in the same trial had been unfairly convicted, calling the verdict “appalling”.
Bialiatski denied being guilty to the charges labeled against him and three co-defendants who were charged with financing protests and smuggling money.
The 60 years old was the co-founder of the Viasna human rights group and one of the most prominent of hundreds of Belarusians who were jailed during a crackdown on months of anti-government protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 and continued into 2021.
He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last October for his work on human rights and democracy, sharing it with Russian rights group Memorial and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, Reuters further reported.
