Ales Bialiatski: who is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize

Ales Bialiatski, Memorial and Center for Civil Liberties were chosen together as the Nobel Peace Prize 2022 “for criticizing power” and “reporting crimes against humanity,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee, based in Oslo, announced Friday.

Ales Bialiatski and the two civil rights organizations hhave made an exceptional effort to document war crimes, human rights abuses and abuse of power.

Who is Ale Bialiatski?

Ales Bialiatski was born on September 25, 1962, in Vyartsilya, in present-day Karelia, Russia. At the age of three, his family returned to Belarus where Ales grew up and studied Belarusian literature.. Also, graduated from Homiel State University with a bachelor’s degree in Russian philology and Belarusian.

After graduating, she worked as a teacher and in 1985 he served in the army as a driver of an armored vehicle.

His work as an activist began in the 1980s and he was one of the initiators of the democratic movement that emerged in Belarus. Since then he has dedicated himself to promoting democracy and peaceful development in his home country. In 1996 he founded the organization Viasna (Spring) in response to the controversial constitutional reforms that gave dictatorial powers to the president and that triggered widespread demonstrations. Viasna supported the imprisoned protesters and their families.

In the years that followed, Viasna evolved into a human rights organization that documented and he protested against the use of torture by the authorities against political prisoners.

Government authorities have tried to silence Ales Bialiatski, for which he was imprisoned from 2011 to 2014 and in 2020 he was arrested again for holding large-scale demonstrations against the regime, is still detained and without a trial.

Memorial

human rights organization Memorial was founded in 1987 by human rights activists in the former Soviet Union who wanted to make sure that the victims of the communist regime’s oppression were never forgotten.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and human rights defender Svetlana Gannushkina They were among the founders.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Memorial was consolidated become the largest human rights organization in Russia. In addition to establishing a documentation center on the victims of the Stalinist era, Memorial collected and systematized information on political oppression and human rights violations in Russia.

memorial became the most authoritative source of information on political prisoners in Russian detention centers.

During the Chechen wars, Memorial collected and verified information on abuses and war crimes perpetrated against the civilian population by Russian and pro-Russian forces. In 2009, the head of the Memorial branch in Chechnya, Natalia Estemirova, was killed because of this work.

In December 2021, the authorities decided to forcibly liquidate Memorial and permanently close the documentation center, but the people behind Memorial refuse to close.

Center for Civil Liberties

Another recognized organization was the Center for Civil Liberties, which was founded in Kyiv in 2007. for the purpose of promoting human rights and democracy in Ukraine.

Its goal has been “to strengthen Ukrainian civil society and put pressure on the authorities to make Ukraine a full-fledged democracy.

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Center for Civil Liberties has pledged to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population. In collaboration with international partners, the center is playing a pioneering role in holding the guilty to account for their crimes.

PJG