A court in Belarus has sentenced Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski to 10 years in prison.
Bialiatski, who was arrested in 2021, and three co-defendants were convicted of smuggling and financing protests and smuggling money.
Belarusian state news agency reports that the court had handed down long jail sentences to all the men, including a decade in prison for Bialiatski.
He denied the charges against him, calling them politically motivated.
Bialiatski, 60, was awarded the Nobel prize in October for his work promoting human rights and democracy in a country which ex-Soviet farm boss Alexander Lukashenko, a staunch ally of Russia, has ruled with an iron hand for nearly 30 years, violently locking up his opponents or forcing them to flee.
The other three men convicted were Valentin Stefanovich, sentenced to nine years, Vladimir Labkovich, who got seven years, and Dmitry Solovyov, who received eight years but was not present in the court.
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya said Bialiatski and three other activists sentenced in the same trial – one of whom was tried in absentia – had been unfairly convicted, and described the verdict as “appalling”.
Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told a briefing in Geneva that the United Nations body was disturbed by the trial and worried by “the lack of fair trial proceedings and access to an independent judiciary in Belarus”.
Bialiatski, a former Soviet dissident, was one of hundreds of Belarusians imprisoned during a crackdown on months of anti-government protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 and continued into 2021.
Viasna, the organization he co-founded, played a key role in providing legal and financial assistance to those who were imprisoned.
Protests erupted after Lukashenko was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, a result that the opposition and Western countries deemed fraudulent.
