Free Ales Bialiatski, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate
LiberecoDec 07, 2022
The trial of 60-year-old Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski began on Thursday. He is among hundreds of Belarusians who were jailed during a crackdown on anti-government protests in 2020 and faces 12 years in prison if convicted.
The 2020 protests erupted in opposition to Pres. Alexander Lukashenko, who's been in office since 1994. Bialiatski, the founder of the Viasna human rights center, faces trial alongside two other top figures in the group.
The Russian-allied Lukashenko government is an authoritarian, warmongering regime with no respect for human rights, which is why it felt the need to arrest Bialiatski and thousands of others to retain its grip on the Belarusian people. Bialiatski's career exemplifies the democratic ideals shared secretly by people in the East and vocally by leaders in the West, and the only solution to this unfortunate trial is to free him, his colleagues, and every other political prisoner currently behind bars.
For Western governments, media outlets, and Western-aligned NGOs to criticize Lukashenko harshly is laughable, given that these same organizations have conducted smear campaigns and attempted international arrests of whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. The CIA is alleged to have been involved in regime change operations in Belarus, so to what extent these protests erupted out of nowhere is blurry at best. The US and EU should stop hypocritically criticizing other governments.