The Nobel Peace Prize rewards civil activism in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine

Recognize the work of the Belarusian Bialiatski, the Russian NGO Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine

The Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian NGO Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties of Ukraine have been recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize, in an award with which the Norwegian Committee has wanted to applaud the work of civil society in defense of Human Rights in the three countries.

"Together, they demonstrate the meaning of civil society for peace and democracy," concluded the jury, which in the case of Belarus recognized the work of Bialiatski, a lawyer who began his activism in the 1980s and founded in 1996 the Viasna organization as a counterweight to the "dictatorial" tendencies of Alexander Lukashenko's regime.

Bialiatski spent three years in prison, between 2011 and 2014, and was arrested again after the 2020 post-election protests. He is still in pretrial detention, making him the fourth person to be awarded the Nobel Prize while in prison, along with Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi, the Chinese Liu Xiaobo and the German Carl von Ossietzky.

In Russia, the Norwegian Committee has focused on the NGO Memorial, founded in 1987, in the midst of Soviet decline, by activists such as Andrei Sakharov, who had previously been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The organization continued to grow after the collapse of the USSR and its constant conflict with the Kremlin led to its being declared a "foreign agent" and forced to close at the end of 2021.

"Civil society actors in Russia have been victims of threats, arrests, disappearances and murders for many years," read the jury's conclusions.

For its part, the Center for Civil Liberties emerged in 2007 to promote democracy and the defense of human rights in Ukraine and, in recent months, has worked to identify and document the alleged war crimes perpetrated by Russia. It had already advocated since its foundation for Ukraine's incorporation into the International Criminal Court (ICC), for the sake of accountability.

The activist and the two organizations laureates this Friday pick up the witness of the journalists Maria Ressa and Dimitri Muratov, awarded in the 2021 edition, and will receive a recognition in December in Oslo that also entails the delivery of 10 million Swedish crowns (plus of 917,000 euros).

For this year's edition, 342 candidates had been submitted, of which 251 correspond to individuals and 92 to organizations. The list, which closed at the end of January, is the second largest in the history of the awards, only behind the record of 376 reached in 2016.