Human rights activist Ales Byalyatski has advocated for political prisoners in Belarus for decades, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize, but he paid the price for it - with his own freedom, Reuters reports today.
The Nobel Prize awarded in 2022 made Byalyatski a globally recognizable symbol of resistance to the authoritarian rule of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has crushed all opposition in the former Soviet state of about nine million people during his three decades in power.
The release of Byalyatski today, along with 122 other prisoners, after negotiations with an envoy of US President Donald Trump, represents Lukashenko's most significant move so far as part of a strategy to re-engage with Washington, with the aim of lifting economic sanctions, according to Reuters.
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The thin, white-haired Byalyatski (63) was released just three days after exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya attended this year's Nobel Prize ceremony carrying his portrait, "to show that this wonderful person is still in prison."
Byalyatski was arrested in 2021 as part of a crackdown on mass protests that erupted after Lukashenko was declared the winner of presidential elections the year before, which the opposition claimed were rigged.
While other dissidents left the country for safety reasons, Byaljacki decided to stay.
"He knew all the risks, he was fully aware," his wife, Natalia Pinchuk, told Reuters in October 2022, the day he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with the Russian organization Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
"There were suggestions that he should leave. His colleagues were arrested. And he said that out of principle he was responsible for them and that he could not leave in such a difficult situation. How could he leave while they were imprisoned?" Pinchuk said.
Accepting the award on behalf of her husband in Oslo that December, Pinchuk said Byaljatka dedicated it to "the millions of Belarusian citizens who stood up and acted on the streets and online to defend their civil rights."
In April 2023, Byaljacki was sentenced to ten years in a penal colony after being found guilty of financial and smuggling charges related to the financing of the Vyasna organization he founded. He denied the charges, insisting they were politically motivated.
Supporters have long expressed concerns about his health while serving his sentence in penal colony number 9 in the town of Khorkhi, near the border with Russia.
According to Vjasna, he was allowed to occasionally send letters and postcards, but not to receive mail or have medication sent to him.
Decades of activism
Byalyatski was born on September 25, 1962, and graduated from Gomel State University in 1984 with a degree in Russian and Belarusian philology. After initially working as a teacher, he became a researcher of Belarusian literature and a museum director.
He began advocating for independence and democracy in Belarus in the early 1980s, organizing anti-Soviet protests before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
During the mass opposition protests of 1996, he was one of the founders of Vjasna, which aimed to provide financial and legal assistance to political prisoners and their families. The organization also documented abuse and torture of political prisoners, which the authorities denied.
He served his first prison sentence from 2011 to 2014 on tax evasion charges, which he denied. In total, he spent more than seven years behind bars.
Bialacki is the fourth person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize while deprived of her liberty, after German Karl von Ossietzky in 1935, Chinese Liu Xiaobo in 2010, and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest, in 1991.
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