The Memorial Center for Civil Liberties won the Nobel Peace Prize

On the case of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya: a human rights activist who was arrested in Belarus in 2019 under the Lukashenko regime

von der Leyen said that civil society has the power to fight for democracy. Tell them their stories. Share their engagement. Help make the world a freer place.”

Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya slammed the sentencing of Bialiatski and other activists in the same trial as “appalling.”

The first official response to the prize was given by the ministry of foreign affairs, but it avoided mentioning Mr. Bialiatski, who is one of the winners of the prize.

It is the first time that the award has ever been given to a country other than Sweden. While the Ukrainian organization that won, the Center for Civil Liberties, is celebrating, many Ukrainians are upset they need to share the award with other countries.

The activist was arrested in 2020 amid widespread protests against Lukashenko’s regime. “He is still detained without trial. Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus,” the committee said.

She said that the committee was aware of the possibility that Bialiatski might face additional scrutiny from authorities in his country after being awarded the prize.

The Swedish Human Rights Center Memorial Prize: Campaigning for a Republic that Lives in the War of the Cold Cold War and Protecting the Human Rights Defenders

The people behind these organizations are choosing to take a risk and pay a high price when they fight for what they think in, she said. “We do pray that this price will not affect him negatively, but we hope it might boost his morale.

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 been a leader in fighting militarism and promoting human rights and government based on the rule of law.

She said the attention that Mr Putin has drawn on himself is relevant to the way civil society and human rights advocates are being suppressed. “That is what 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.

Volodymyr Yavorskyi, a representative of the Center for Civil Liberties, said that the award was important to the organization because they worked in a country that was invisible.

Last year’s winners have faced a tough time since receiving the prize. Journalists Dmitry Muratov of Russia and Maria Ressa of the Philippines have been fighting for the survival of their news organizations, defying government efforts to silence them

The three winners will share the prize money of 10,000,000 Swedish krona ($900,000). The Nobel Prizes will be officially awarded to the laureates at a ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

The 2011 Ukrainian case against a former state minister for human rights, Mr. Bialiatski, arrives at Moscow for the first international conference on human rights in Belarus

The wife of Mr. Bialiatski said in her letters to her husband that they didn’t discuss his imprisonment or the criminal case against him. Visits and phone calls are forbidden, she said.

The local organization that he was involved in, called Tutajshyja, was a dissident cultural organization in the 1980’s that helped lay the groundwork for the movement for independence from the Soviet Union.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1994 election of Belarus’s authoritarian leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Mr. Bialiatski helped found and lead Viasna, or Spring, a rights group whose members are now nearly all in prison or living in exile abroad.

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.

In an interview, Mr. Sannikov said that he hopes the news sends a message to both Lukashenko and his prison staff that the world will punish them.

The 2011 charges related to money he had received from abroad to help fund the Viasna rights group, of which he was president, and were based in part on confidential banking information provided to Belarusian prosecutors by Lithuania and Poland. Mr. Sannikov said that the case showed how the authorities had often aided Mr. Lukashenko.

He said the European and the West don’t pay enough attention to human rights in Belarus, including the use of torture and other abuses.

Natalia Satsunkevich, a Viasna activist, who now lives in exile, stated that Mr. Bialiatski was being held in inhumane conditions.

She said that the Peace Prize and recipients from Russia and Ukraine show how close these countries are to each other and that the concept caused a bit of controversy in Ukraine on Friday.

She said that the prize had come as a total surprise. She said she was unable to hear what was being said because she was outside on the noisy street when she received the phone call.

A friend was trying to reach her but she finally realized that her husband had been selected for the award when she called back.

The Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, which helped organize the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and can change world history faster than the UN

Mr. Lukashenko repaid the Kremlin’s support by allowing Russian forces to use Belarusian territory as a base for their invasion of Ukranian on February 24.

Mr. Sannikov hoped that there would be support for the opposition in the period of attention.

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

There were protests against the war in Russia but the winner of the award was the Memorial, a human rights group. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave cover to domestic violence in the Balkans, argued the winner of the Belarusian contest in that year.

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.

The Ukrainian group, Center for Civil Liberties, has “engaged in efforts to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population” since the invasion was launched in February, the committee said.

Responding to the news that the organization she co-founded won a Nobel Peace Prize, Olexandra Matviychuk wrote that Ukraine can provide an example to activists in other countries pushing through civil rights reform.

She wrote that there can be mass movements of ordinary people in different countries of the world that can change world history quicker than the UN can.

The center is helping international partners to hold the guilty parties accountable for their crimes.

The head of the organization said on Facebook she was happy that the center had received the prize together with their friends and partners.

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee for Crimes against Human Rights and the Violence of Power: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Alexander Lukashenko

She also called for the creation of an international tribunal to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for war crimes.

It had been widely anticipated that the Nobel decision-makers would focus attention on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, given its aftershocks in security and stability across the globe.

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

“The committee is giving a message about the importance of political freedoms, civil liberties and an active civil society as being part of what makes for a peaceful society,” Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told CNN. That is an important message, I think.

“This prize has a lot of layers on it; it’s covering a lot of ground and giving more than one message,” he added. “(It is) a prize about citizenship, and what is the best kind of citizenship if we wish to be citizens of peaceful countries in a peaceful world.”

The chair of the committee said this year was the most unusual that they have seen because of a war in Europe and a war that affects people all over the world.

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 were honored for “an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power” in their respective countries.

The regime of Lukashenko supports Putin and is fighting civil society with violence and imprisonment, according to Baerbock.