MOSCOW — A court in Belarus on Friday (March 3) sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison, according to Russia's state-owned news agency Tass, a verdict likely to be strongly condemned by Western human rights groups.
Bialiatski, a pro-democracy activist and founder of the Viasna human rights group that provided legal and financial help to protesters during a 2020 wave of unrest in Belarus, was convicted of financing protests and tax evasion.
He has said he is being persecuted for political reasons.
Rights groups say there are around 1,500 political prisoners in Belarus.
Many have been in jail since the suppression of the 2020 protests, which erupted after Alexander Lukashenko declared he was re-elected in polls the West and the Belarusian opposition said were fraudulent.
Bialiatski was arrested in 2021 following massive street protests over widely disputed elections that kept Lukashengko in power the previous year.
Demonstrators were met with brutality by the police, and Lukashenko critics were regularly arrested and jailed during the protests
Bialiatski, who was one of three winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, has been held without trial since his arrest.
Belarusian journalist Hanna Lubiakova said Viasna had been targeted by the authorities in Minsk because it helped victims of repression to pay for fines and lawyers, and Bialiatski himself was "the face of the organisation".
The head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, said when awarding the 2022 prize that "government authorities have repeatedly sought to silence" Bialiatski.
"Despite tremendous personal hardship, Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus," she added at the time.
Shortly before his arrest in 2021, he wrote on his Facebook page that the Belarusian authorities "are acting as a regime of occupation".
"Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across all of Belarus, and hundreds [of them are] detained," he wrote.
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