Ales Bialiatski, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October for his decades of defending human rights in Belarus, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Friday, according to Viasna.
Mr. Bialiatski has been a staunch supporter of the human rights movement in Eastern Europe since the late 1980s, when Belarus was part of the Soviet Union. Most members of Viasna, the group that he helped to found, are now in prison or living in exile from the country’s authoritarian government, which is one of Russia’s closest allies and a key supporter of its war in Ukraine.
Mr. Bialiatski was arrested in 2021 on charges of tax evasion, an accusation that rights groups denounced as fraudulent. After huge street protests erupted in 2020, Belarus started a sweeping and brutal crackdown on dissent.
At the time, Russia helped Belarus to quash those protests and in return the country’s authoritarian leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, repaid the Kremlin by allowing Russian forces to use Belarusian territory as a staging ground for their invasion of Ukraine a year ago.
Mr. Bialiatski’s wife, Natalia Pinchuk, said in October that she had sent a telegram to her husband in jail to inform him of the Nobel Peace Prize, and that she had not seen him since a few days before his arrest in July 2021.
When the award was announced, Natalia Satsunkevich, a Viasna activist living in exile, told Dozhd, an online Russian television channel that has been shut down in Russia and now operates from abroad, that giving Mr. Bialiatski the accolade, along with recipients from Ukraine and Russia, was “very symbolic.”
