Nobel peace laureate transferred to brutal prison in Belarus, says wife – trendswire

TALLINN (ESTONIA): Nobel Peace Prize Ales bialiatic He has been transferred to a notoriously brutal prison in Belarus and has not been heard from in a month, his wife said Wednesday.
Natalia Pinchuk told The Associated Press that Bialiatski, who is serving a 10-year sentence, has been in a news blackout since his transfer to the N9 colony for repeat offenders in the city of Gorki, where inmates are beaten and subjected to forced labor. .
“The authorities create unbearable conditions for Ales and keep him in strict information isolation. There is not a single letter from him for a month, nor does he receive my letters,” Pinchuk said by phone.
In March, a court convicted Bialiatski, 60, Belarus’s leading human rights defender and one of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winners, and three of his colleagues on charges of financing actions that violate law and order. public and smuggling.
It was the latest move in a years-long crackdown on dissent that has plagued the country since 2020.
Bialiatski has spent 20 months behind bars since his arrest in 2021, and Pinchuk worries that his health is deteriorating.
“In the most recent letters I see how his handwriting has changed and I see how the situation for him is getting worse, both in his health and his eyesight, and I am very, very worried about that,” she said. She urged the United Nations to intervene.
The harsh punishment of Bialiatski and three of his colleagues was a response to mass protests over the 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a new term.
Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has ruled the country with an iron fist since 1994. During the 2020 protests, the largest in Belarus, more than 35,000 people were arrested and thousands were killed. beaten by the police.
The four activists have maintained their innocence, according to the Viasna Human Rights Center, founded by Bialiatski. He shared the 2022 peace prize with Memorial, a prominent Russian human rights group, and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties.
Viasna has counted 1,516 political prisoners in Belarus to date. Human rights defenders say the authorities deliberately create unbearable conditions for many of them.
For 28 days there has been no information on the fate of the imprisoned former presidential candidate Viktor Babaryka, who would have been beaten in his cell and transferred to a hospital. no one has heard of Nikolai Statkevicha leading opposition figure serving a 14-year sentence, for 100 days.