Ales Bialatski, a 2022 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday by a court in Belarus. The human rights group he founded, Viasna, announced that he was convicted of financing “actions grossly violating public order” along with smuggling. Bialatski, 60, who pleaded not guilty, was arrested in 2021 after the country’s huge protests over its 2020 elections. He was accused of smuggling in funds to aid the opposition. Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanouskaya on Friday called the sentence “simply appalling.” In 2022, Norwegian Nobel committee head Berit Reiss-Anderson said when bestowing the peace prize on Bialatski that Alexander Lukashenko’s authoritarian government had “for years tried to silence him.”
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