In an important gesture of solidarity with civil society groups defending human rights in Russia and eastern Europe, the Nobel peace prize committee has this year deservedly honoured Russia’s Memorial, the Centre for Civil Liberties in Ukraine and Ales Bialiatski, a jailed Belarusian activist.
Bialiatski, head of the rights group Viasna, was detained last July as part of a crackdown on the opposition by Vladimir Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko. He is the fourth person to receive the prize while in prison or detention, after Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar in 1991 and Liu Xiaobo of China in 2010. After endorsing opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya in 2020′s presidential election and documenting Lukashenko’s repression, he was jailed last year for “tax evasion”.
Memorial, founded by Andrei Sakharov as the Soviet Union began to break apart, was closed down by the Russian authorities last year. A court is this week considering seizing its property and its leaders face prosecution under the notorious foreign agents law. The human rights group, Russia’s oldest, focused originally on preserving the memory of the estimated 20 million people imprisoned in the gulags by Joseph Stalin. Its courageous archival work has increasingly shone a glaring, truth-telling light on attempts by Putin to rewrite history, whitewashing the crimes of the old Soviet leaders, and its authoritative advocacy for human rights in contemporary Russia has become a thorn in the regime’s side. It has supported more than 1,500 cases before the European Court of Human Rights.
The Centre for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, after years working to defend Ukrainians held in captivity in Russian-occupied territories, has engaged in laborious efforts to document evidence of Russian war crimes since the invasion. The Nobel awards are an important echo of Sakharov’s insistence that the defence of freedom of thought and human rights is as important in constraining dictators from starting wars as is nuclear deterrence.