A court in Belarus on Friday (March 3) sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison, according to Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass, a verdict likely to be strongly condemned by Western human rights groups.
Bialiatski, a pro-democracy activist and founder of the Viasna human rights group that provided legal and financial help to protesters during a 2020 wave of unrest in Belarus, was convicted of financing protests and tax evasion.
He has said he is being persecuted for political reasons.
Rights groups say there are around 1,500 political prisoners in Belarus.
Many have been in jail since the suppression of the 2020 protests, which erupted after Alexander Lukashenko declared he was re-elected in polls the West and the Belarusian opposition said were fraudulent.
Bialiatski was arrested in 2021 following massive street protests over widely disputed elections that kept Lukashengko in power the previous year.
