The Oslo Peace Prize for Human Rights and Democracy in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine: In memory of Alexander Lukashenko’s courageous fight for human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence

Von der Leyen said they show the true power of civil society in the fight for democracy. Tell them what you know. Share their engagement. Help make the world a freer place.”

After running a campaign against Alexander Lukashenko in the August 2020 election, which was denounced by the international community as neither free nor fair, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had to flee toLithuania and was granted political asylum.

Mr. Sannikov said the naming of Mr. Bialiatski as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize would help focus attention on Mr. Lukashenko’s role in the invasion of Ukraine, for which his country has been punished with economic sanctions, but with far less severity than the penalties imposed on Russia.

The Norwegian committee wanted to honor the three “outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence in the neighbor countries” of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr Bialiatski has not yielded one inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus,” Reiss-Andersen said, adding that the Nobel panel was calling on Belarusian authorities to release him.

She said the Nobel Committee was aware of the possibility that by awarding him the prize Bialiatski might face additional scrutiny from authorities in Belarus.

The 2018 Nobel Prizes for Human Rights and Democracy: The Memory of Alfred Nobel and the Center for Civil Liberties, Volodymyr Yavorskyi

“But we also have the point of view that the individuals behind these organizations, they have chosen to take a risk and pay a high price and show courage to fight for what they believe in,” she said. We hope the price doesn’t affect him negatively, but we also hope that it will boost his spirits.

Memorial, one of Russia’s most well-known and respected human rights groups, worked to expose the abuses and atrocities of the Stalinist era for more than three decades before it was ordered to close by the country’s Supreme Court late last year.

“The organization has also been standing at the forefront of efforts to combat militarism and promote human rights and government based on the rule of law,” said Reiss-Andersen.

The attention Mr. Putin has paid to himself is relevant in this context as a civil society and human rights advocates are being suppressed. That is something we would like to address with this prize.

“The center has taken a stand to strengthen Ukrainian civil society and pressure the authorities to make Ukraine a full fledged democracy, to develop Ukraine into a state governed by rule of law,” said Reiss-Andersen.

A representative of the Center for Civil Liberties, Volodymyr Yavorskyi, said the award was important for the organization, because “for many years we worked in a country that was invisible.”

Their victory comes seven months after the war between Russia and Ukraine. It was believed that the committee would pay tribute to activists in the countries affected by the conflict.

The prize money of 10 million Swedish krona is shared by three winners. The Nobel Prizes will be officially awarded to the laureates at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

Viasna activist and human rights activist Vlasovski Bialiatski: “Inhuman conditions” are “terrible”

In their letters to each other, Mr. Bialiatski and his wife did not mention the treatment he received in jail or the criminal case against him. Visits and phone calls are forbidden, she said.

He was active in Tutajshyja, or “The Locals,” a dissident cultural organization that helped lay the groundwork in the late Soviet period for a movement calling for the independence of Belarus.

Bialiatski, meanwhile, has documented human rights abuses in Belarus since the 1980s. He started Viasna in 1996 after the referendum consolidated the authoritarian powers of Lukashenko.

He served for a time as the director of a museum honoring Maksim Bahdanovic, a poet who is considered a founder of modern Belarusian literature, but was forced out of that post when Mr. Lukashenko, who has now been president for 28 years, started cracking down on the Belarusian language and promoting Russian.

“I hope this sends a strong signal to both Lukashenko and his prison wardens that the world is watching and will definitely punish the perpetrators,” Mr. Sannikov, who now lives in exile in Poland, said in an interview.

He received money from abroad and was charged with money Laundering because of some information that prosecutors in Poland andLithuania had given them. The case, Mr. Sannikov said, showed how the European authorities had sometimes been complicit in helping Mr. Lukashenko consolidate his increasingly autocratic regime.

He said that Europe and the west don’t pay enough attention to human rights in the country, which he described as “terrible,” including frequent use of torture.

Natalia Satsunkevich, an activist with Viasna who now lives in exile, told Dozhd that Mr Bialiatski was being held in “inhuman conditions” by the Russian authorities.

The Center for Civil Liberties (CPLC) as a revolutionary role in organizing human rights in the world and ensuring the resolution of the crisis in Ukraine

She said the idea of the Peace Prize was symbolic and highlighted how closely these countries are now connected by war despite some in Ukraine questioning it on Friday.

She said the award had come as a total surprise. She said that she had not been able to hear what the committee had said because she was on a noisy street.

Noticing a flood of missed calls on her cellphone, she finally learned that her husband had been selected for the award when she called back a friend who had been trying to reach her.

Mr. Lukashenko, repaying the Kremlin for its support, allowed Belarusian territory to be used by Russian forces as staging ground for their invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

“Inevitably there will now be a period of attention,” Mr. Sannikov said, adding that he hoped it would translate into specific support for Mr. Lukashenko’s opponents.

“Neither Russian nor Belarusian organizations were able to organize resistance to the war,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a top Ukrainian official, on Twitter.

Russian protests against the war in Crimea had been relatively subdued, despite the fact that the Memorial had condemned the country’s invasion. The Belarusian winner, Ales Bialatski, argued in 2014 that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year gave cover to domestic repression in Belarus.

Ukrainian journalist Olga Tokariuk joined the chorus on social media, writing that this year’s shared prize gives the impression that Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia face the same challenges.

When the Center for Civil Liberties was founded in 2007, though, few expected the future of human rights in the region to be defined by war. The group was first known to Ukrainians in the year 2013 when they supported activists and journalists who were jailed by the Ukrainian president.

She said the prize would ensure justice for people affected by the war, and she accepted it on behalf of her human rights organization.

“The mass mobilization of ordinary people in different countries of the world and their joint voice can change world history faster than the intervention of the United Nations,” she wrote.

In collaboration with international partners, the center is playing a revolutionary role in holding the guilty parties accountable for their crimes.

The center received the prize together with our friends and partners, according to the head of the organization.

Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk called for an international tribunal to Putin and Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko to justice over “war crimes” in her acceptance speech.

It had been expected that the decision makers would focus attention on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, given its effect on security across the globe.

But those involved in leading military campaigns, such as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, were seen as longshots given that government-led peace negotiations appear to offer slim hopes of a resolution to the conflict in the near future.

The Russia/Ukraine War, Crime and Power: a Plethora of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Critique of Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Putin

The committee is telling people the importance of political freedoms, civil liberties and an active civil society as part of what makes for a peaceful society. I think that is a very important message.

“This prize has a lot of layers on it; it’s covering a lot of ground and giving more than one message,” he added. If we want to be citizens of a peaceful world, what is the best kind of citizenship?

The war in Europe was unusual but also had a global effect on people all over the world, according to the chair of the committee.

Ukrainian officials and some military analysts say that as the Russian military retreats in the east and the south, it is growing more determined to destroy infrastructure and more indiscriminate about causing civilian casualties, using its advantage in long-range munitions as if to punish Ukraine for Moscow’s losses.

On the day that the peace prize was awarded, Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin, were publicly rebuked for violating the rights of its own people.

Overnight nearly 40 Russian rockets hit Nikopol, on the Dnipro River, damaging at least 10 homes, several apartment blocks and other infrastructure, according to the head of the regional military administration, Valentyn Reznichenko. He said that on Friday evening a man was killed and another was wounded.

Russian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Yan Rachinsky blasted President Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” war on Ukraine in his acceptance speech in the Norwegian capital Oslo on Saturday.

The new Laureates achieved renown for their work in documenting war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power.