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Belarus, Russia, Ukraine rights activists win Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, as well as the Russian human rights organization Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.

The awards were named on Friday by Berit Reiss-Ansersen, chairperson of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and came as war rages in Eastern Europe.

“The peace prize laureates represent civil society in their home countries, Reiss-Andersen said. “They have for many years promoted the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens.”

This year’s recipients come from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year. Belarus has sided with Russia. It has also suppressed democratic progress on its own side. Last year the editor of Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper famous for its critical stance on the Kremlin, won the award. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who died earlier this year, also won this award in 1990, for “the leading role he played in the radical changes in East-West relations” and the “greater openness” he brought to Soviet society.

“I think the message is clear: we are not pro or anti-country,” says Kadri Liik, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, about the Nobel committee’s choice. “We are pro-democracy and human rights.”

Here’s what we know about today’s winners:

Ales Bialiatski
Bialiatski is one of the early founders of the democracy movement in Belarus, starting in the 1980s, and one of the country’s most well-known human rights activists. Bialiatski has led a 30-year campaign for democracy and freedom, first under the former Soviet Republic and, since 1996, as the founder of a human rights centre to help political prisoners in the country’s capital of Minsk.

Since then, Viasna (Spring) Human Rights Centre has become the country’s leading civil society organization through documenting human rights abuses and monitoring elections. Bialiatski has been persecuted for years by the regime of Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko, who’s been in power since 1994. Bialiatski has been in and out of prison and is currently in prison on what many belief are trumped-up charges of tax evasion; He never went to trial for these charges.

“He has devoted his life to promoting democracy and peaceful development in his home country,” said Reiss-Ansersen, the chairperson of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Memorial
The human rights group ‘Memorial’ emerged out of a push for new freedoms in the late Soviet era.

Founded by Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner Andrei Sakharov, Memorial initially sought to document Stalinist-era repressions and preserve the memory and experiences of the millions of Soviets who vanished in the labour camps known as the gulag.

Yet it was the organization’s work documenting human rights abuses in the new Russia that put Memorial increasingly at odds with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.

In 2021, the organization was “liquidated” for failure to meet reporting requirements under Russia’s “foreign agents” law. A parallel case found Memorial’s human rights wing guilty of “promoting terrorism” through a list it keeps of current-day political prisoners.

Memorial insisted both trials were politically motivated and continued its activities informally despite the court rulings, says Memorial member Svetlana Gannushkina, who was cited by the Nobel Committee as an early supporter of the group’s work.

“No one can ban us from fighting for human rights and we continue that work in different forms,” said Gannushkina in an interview with NPR.

Memorial has long been rumoured as a potential Nobel finalist — a factor Gannushkina said convinced her to tune out the announcement long ago.

“I only found out from journalists when they started calling,” said Gannushkina.

“It’s important. It’s a show of solidarity,” she added when asked about the Nobel Prize. “An acknowledgement that not all Russians are bad and that there are those of us who are against the war in Ukraine.”

The Center for Civil Liberties
The civil society group was founded in 2007, when Ukraine’s human rights activists began to reach out across borders, learning how to better organize and use international courts to defend vulnerable populations.

In 2013, when the Ukrainian government arrested activists and journalists during a popular uprising, that knowledge came in handy.

It was a similar scenario a year later when Russia invaded parts of eastern Ukraine.

Attorney Yuriy Bilous has worked with the centre, building war crimes cases against Russian troops and documenting crimes committed by Russian soldiers, in this year’s invasion.

“First of all, they tell the world about what’s going on in Ukraine,” Bilous told NPR, speaking about the centre’s work. “They hold international institutions accountable so as to prevent crimes in the future. Their work creates opportunities to discuss the future of international criminal law.”

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