As many as three laureates of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize received their medals and diplomas on Saturday at a graceful ceremony in Oslo. This year’s Peace Prize is awarded to human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski from Belarus, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties.
The Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 has been awarded to the three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence in the neighbour countries Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
It is pertinently mention that the Peace Prize laureates represent civil society in their home countries. They have for many years promoted the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens. They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.
Expressing their views during Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, the winners denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Ales Bialiatski has worked to promote democracy and human rights in Belarus since the 1980s. He has been called a beacon of light for these efforts throughout Eastern Europe. Bialiatski, who is facing trail and jailed in Belarus for up to 12 years, was not allowed to send his speech. He shared a few thoughts when he met in jail with his wife, Natallia Pinchuk, who spoke on his behalf at the award ceremony in Stockholm.
“In my homeland, the entirety of Belarus is in a prison,” Bialiatski said in the remarks delivered by Pinchuk — in reference to a sweeping crackdown on the opposition after massive protests against an August 2020 fraud-tainted vote that Lukashenko used to extend his rule. “This award belongs to all my human rights defender friends, all civic activists, tens of thousands of Belarusians who have gone through beatings, torture, arrests, prison.” Bialiatski is the fourth person in the 121-year history of the Nobel Prizes to receive the award while in prison or detention.
In the remarks delivered by his wife, he cast Lukashenko as a tool of Putin, saying the Russian leader is seeking to establish his domination across the ex-Soviet lands.
“I know exactly what kind of Ukraine would suit Russia and Putin — a dependent dictatorship,” Bialiatski said. “The same as today’s Belarus, where the voice of the oppressed people is ignored and disregarded.”
TLTP has learnt that in response to adjudication in Russia’s Supreme Court, one of the Russia’s oldest and most prominent human rights organizations ‘Memorial’ was shut down. The Memorial was widely acclaimed for its studies of political repression in the Soviet Union, in December 2021.
It is also reported that Russian government had declared the organization a “foreign agent”- a label that implies additional government scrutiny and carries strong pejorative connotations that can discredit the targeted organization.
Delivering his speech while representing Memorial for the event, Jan Rachinsky said, “Today’s sad state of civil society in Russia is a direct consequence of its unresolved past.” He particularly denounced the Kremlin’s attempts to denigrate the history, statehood and independence of Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations, saying that it “became the ideological justification for the insane and criminal war of aggression against Ukraine.”
Rachinsky said, “One of the first victims of this madness was the historical memory of Russia itself – Now, the Russian mass media refer to the unprovoked armed invasion of a neighboring country, the annexation of territories, terror against civilians in the occupied areas, and war crimes as justified by the need to fight fascism.”
On the occasion, Oleksandra Matviichuk of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties dismissed calls for a political compromise saying, “fighting for peace does not mean yielding to pressure of the aggressor, it means protecting people from its cruelty.”
She further expressed, “Peace cannot be reached by a country under attack laying down its arms,”.
“This would not be peace, but occupation.” Matviichuk reiterated her earlier call for Putin – and Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, who provided his country’s territory for Russian troops to invade Ukraine – to face an international tribunal.
She has been reported saying, “We have to prove that the rule of law does work, and justice does exist, even if they are delayed,”. Matviichuk was named a co-winner of the 2022 peace prize in October along with Russian human rights group Memorial and Ales Bialiatski, head of the Belarusian rights group Viasna.
