This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian activists for promoting the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens.
Prison activist Ales Bialiatski of Belarus, the Russian organization Memorial and the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties group were announced as recipients in October.
Al Jazeera will be live at 16:00 GMT from Oslo, Norway to talk to Natallia Pinchuk, Bialiatski’s wife, Jan Rachinsky of Memorial, and Oleksandra Matviichuk of the Center for Civil Liberties about the importance of civil society in time of war and the challenges and dangers activists face in doing their work.
The prize, endowed with about $900,000, was presented on Saturday on the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes in 1895.
In his acceptance speech, Rachinsky criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “insane and criminal” war in Ukraine.
Under Putin, “resistance to Russia is called ‘fascism'” and has become “the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine,” Rachinsky told the audience.
Matviichuk said his country could not achieve peace by “laying down arms” against Russia. “This would not be peace, but occupation,” he said.
Pinchuk delivered a speech on behalf of her husband, saying that Putin wanted to turn Ukraine into a “dependent dictatorship” like Belarus, “where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and ignored.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised the laureates for their “outstanding effort to document war crimes, human rights abuses and the abuse of power.”
“Together they demonstrate the importance of civil society for peace and democracy,” the committee said in its statement.
Here’s a look at who the recipients are and why their work matters:
Ales Bialiatski
Prominent Belarusian human rights activist Bialiatski is the fourth laureate to win the Nobel Peace Prize behind bars.
The founder of leading rights group Viasna had been at the forefront of efforts to document abuses committed by the government of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, described in the West as Europe’s last dictator.
Bialiatski, 60, was jailed in July 2021 after mass street protests over a national vote that kept Lukashenko in power for a sixth term the previous year.
His organization documented the use of torture against political prisoners by the Belarusian authorities and supported imprisoned protesters and their families.
Human rights activist Ales Bialiatski receives the 2020 Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, Sweden [File: Anders Wiklund/TT News Agency via Reuters]
Shortly before he was arrested, Bialiatski condemned the crackdown, saying the local authorities were “acting like an occupation regime”.
Bialiatski had spent three years in prison before being convicted in 2011 of tax evasion, charges he denied. His supporters see the arrest as an attempt to silence him.
Under Lukashenko’s government, which began in 1994, the human rights group applied for registration twice without success.
Despite the lack of formal recognition, Viasna’s activities won numerous international awards, including the US Atlantic Council Freedom Award.
Bialiatski was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2006 and 2007.
memorial
One of Russia’s oldest and most respected human rights groups, Memorial was co-founded by physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov in 1987 to uncover and expose the horrors of Soviet oppression.
This mission was seen as a betrayal by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The organization was shut down by court order in December 2021 for violating the “foreign agents” law. It continued to operate without official registration, documenting Russia’s totalitarian past and organizing educational initiatives to raise public awareness.
Jan Rachinsky, representing the Russian Memorial organization, delivers his Nobel Prize acceptance speech [Rodrigo Freitas/NTB/Reuters]
According to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Memorial’s work “is based on the idea that confronting past crimes is essential to preventing new ones.”
His Human Rights Center was the subject of a legal battle earlier this year as the government tried to seize it because it justified “terrorist activities”.
In 2020, a court increased the sentence of historian Yuri Dmitriev, who presided over Memorial’s northern branch of the Republic of Karelia, from 3.5 to 13 years in prison.
He was found guilty of sexual abuse in a sentence widely seen as retaliation after he uncovered evidence of a mass burial site used by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s secret police.
Dmitriev remains detained in a Russian penal colony.
Center for Civil Liberties
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February, the Civil Liberties Center has documented war crimes against civilians in the occupied areas.
In collaboration with international bodies, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), the organization also engaged in efforts to record the forced relocation of civilians from occupied parts of Ukraine to Russia.
Under his Euromaidan SOS project, he drew attention to the persecution of local government officials, journalists, religious leaders, volunteers and civil society activists in areas under Russian control.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, representing the Ukrainian organization Center for Civil Liberties (CCL), delivers her Nobel Prize acceptance speech [Rodrigo Freitas/NTB/Reuters]
The organization, founded in 2007, drew on its decades of experience in recording cases of wrongful imprisonment and other abuses. When Russia unilaterally annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, the group began documenting the disappearances of Kremlin opponents, including journalists and activists.
In its early years, the Center for Civil Liberties lobbied Ukrainian authorities to turn the country into a full-fledged democracy governed by the rule of law.
A key goal was Ukraine’s accession to the ICC in The Hague. The government accepted the ICC’s jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed on Ukrainian territory indefinitely as of 20 February 2014.