HE The Leninsky Court in Minsk convicted this Friday Nobel Peace Prize Belarusian Ales Bialiatski sentenced to 10 years in prison for smuggling and belongs to a group organized around a case involving the NGO Viasna.
Next to you three more activists convicted; According to BelTA news agency, his deputy is the coordinator of the “free elections” campaign, Valiantsin Stefanovich, Vladimir Labkovich and Dimitri Soloviov.
The prosecution had requested twelve years in prison for Bialiatski, who has been in prison since July 2021 and is also accused of funding anti-government protests and tax evasion.
on his behalf Stefanovich was sentenced to nine years in prisonSoloviov, who was tried ‘in absentia’, was sentenced to eight years and Labkovich to seven years. All between 2013 and 2020, according to prosecutors “along with other unidentified persons” They created a network that made it possible to make a profit of more than 800,000 Belarusian rubles (about 350,000 euros).
Investigators noted that Bialiatski and his colleagues did not register the organization with the Treasury and did not submit relevant documents to the authorities. Thus, they were accused of smuggling about 113,000 Belarusian rubles (about 43,000 euros). However, not all of them admitted to the accusations.
Bialiatski, along with the Russian organizations Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, won the Nobel Prize in 2022. and became the fourth person to receive an award while in detention. The Belarusian Government criticized the Nobel Prize the same day and assured that such recognitions made Alfred Nobel. “Return in your grave”.