Digital Desk: The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this year to Ales Bialiatski, a jailed Belarus rights activist, the Russian organization Memorial, and the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties. Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, announced the winner on Friday in Oslo.
Alessandro Bialiatski Bialiatski,
who was a citizen of Belarus at the time of the award, was born on September
25, 1962, in Vyartsilya, Karelia, Russia. The democratic movement that began to
take root in Belarus in the middle of the 1980s had Bialiatski as one of its
founders. He has dedicated his life to advancing democracy and nonviolent
growth in his native nation. In 1996, he started the group Viasna (Spring). Viasna
developed into a multifaceted human rights organization that exposed and
denounced the use of torture by the government against political detainees.
Ales Bialiatski has been the target of numerous attempts by the government to
silence him. Since 2020, he has been held without being tried.
Despite facing extreme personal
adversity, Mr. Bialiatski has persisted in his fight for democracy and human
rights in Belarus.
Human rights organization memorial In order to ensure that the victims of the brutality of the communist dictatorship would never be forgotten, human rights advocates in the former Soviet Union founded the Memorial in 1987. The foundation of Memorial is the idea that recognizing past crimes is crucial to preventing new ones.
The
organization has also been leading initiatives to counter militarism, advance
human rights, and support governments that uphold the rule of law. Memorial
acquired and verified evidence about abuses and war crimes committed against
the populace by Russian and pro-Russian forces throughout the Chechen Wars.
Natalia Estemirova, the branch manager for Memorial in Chechnya, passed away in
2009 as a result of her job.
The Center for Civil Liberties was established with the goal of furthering democracy and human rights in Ukraine. It has acted to support Ukrainian civil society and put pressure on the government to turn Ukraine into a functioning democracy. The center has been working to detect and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian populace since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The center is taking a leading role in making sure that those responsible for crimes are held accountable.
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