The Belarusian Prosecutor’s Office on Thursday requested twelve years in prison for Belarusian activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski in connection with a case against the Viasna organization, of which he is the founder.
Prosecutors have also requested that his deputy, Valiantsin Stefanovich, and the coordinator of the campaign for «free elections», Vladimir Labkovich, be sentenced to eleven and nine years in prison, respectively.
For his part, he has also asked for ten years for Dimitri Solovyov, who was forced to leave Belarus and is being tried ‘in absentia’. In this regard, the Prosecutor’s Office has stressed that all of them should be sent to a «high-security» prison colony, according to information from the BelTA news agency.
Bialiatski has been in prison since July 2021, although the trial against the NGO, which advocates for the defense of human rights, began on January 5. All of them are accused of tax evasion.
The prosecution has previously warned that the defendants «acted as part of an organized group from April 4, 2016 to July 14, 2021.» Bialiatski, who spent three years in prison between 2011 and 2014 and was re-arrested in the context of the 2020 protests against the government of President Alexander Lukashenko, received the Nobel Peace Prize on October 7 and thus became the fourth imprisoned person to be recognized with this award.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
