As of March 3, 2025, two years have passed since Viasna members Ales Bialiatski (a member of the ICDR), Valiantsin Stefanovic, and Uladzimir Labkovich were convicted and handed heavy prison sentences following an unfair trial under fabricated charges. Andrei Sannikov, a fellow ICDR member, invokes Ales Bialiatski and comments on the Lukashenko’s regime change in the years after Bialiatski’s arrest.
Andrei Sannikov
Member of the ICDR, Coordinator of European Belarus Civic Campaign, Presidential Candidate in 2010, Former prisoner of conscience, Belarus
Belarus is proud to have a Nobel Peace Prize laureate: Ales Bialiatski. Today, he endures the harshest prison conditions under the rule of Alexander Lukashenko.
Yet, he is not the first laureate to receive the prize while in captivity. The first was Carl von Ossietzky, imprisoned by Hitler’s regime and transferred from a concentration camp to a prison hospital. The second was Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist and writer, who was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 11 years in prison. When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his "long-term non-violent struggle for basic human rights in China," he was still behind bars. He was granted medical parole in June 2017 after being diagnosed with liver cancer and died a few weeks later on July 13, 2017.
Other political prisoners who received the Peace Prize include Andrei Sakharov, who was in exile in the Soviet Union; Lech Wałęsa from Poland; and Aung San Suu Kyi from Myanmar, who was under house arrest.
However, Ales Bialiatski is the only laureate to have learned of his award while still awaiting trial. Unlike others, he was accused but not yet convicted at the time of receiving the prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee sent a strong message by honoring Bialiatski in 2022. That year, the prize was awarded to human rights defenders from Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus—two organizations from Russia and Ukraine, and a personal award to Bialiatski of Belarus. The intent was clear: to shield him from a politically motivated conviction. Yet Lukashenko’s regime ignored the international recognition of one of Belarusian citizens and proceeded with its crackdown. Bialiatski was sentenced to 10 years in a penal colony on fabricated charges.
This sentencing placed Lukashenko among history’s most notorious dictators—alongside Hitler, the Chinese Communist Party, Myanmar’s military junta, Soviet secret police (chekists), and Poland’s communist rulers. It revealed the true, ruthless nature of his regime. Bialiatski was arrested during the unprecedented crackdown following the 2020 Belarusian revolution, when mass protests erupted against Lukashenko’s dictatorship. The repression has continued, with near-daily arrests, trials, and imprisonments.
A recently published report by the Group of Independent Experts on Human Rights in Belarus under the agies of UN Human Rights Council states:
“The Group found that the Government of Belarus had continued to rely on arbitrary arrests and detentions—frequently accompanied by torture or ill-treatment—as its primary method of silencing dissent. It also documented that the thousands of Belarusians arrested and tried on politically motivated grounds had been systematically subjected to a separate and harsher regime of detention designed to punish and humiliate them. Those practices, along with heightened surveillance and well-founded fears of rearrest, continued to force many into exile, where an increasing number faced criminal proceedings in absentia. Drawing on its findings and building upon the work of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Group found further evidence of crimes against humanity, specifically imprisonment and persecution, having been perpetrated against a significant segment of the population defined by its real or perceived political views.”
This report is significant - it explicitly describes crimes against humanity committed by the Lukashenko’s regime. His rule mirrors the practices of the most notorious dictatorships in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Today, there is no worse dictatorship on the European continent than that of Lukashenko.
What began in 2020 as excessive police violence against opposition figures and peaceful protesters has escalated into widespread, systematic repression. Force and brutality have become Lukashenko’s only tools for maintaining power. Under these conditions, it is unrealistic to expect that peaceful resistance alone can dismantle his murderous regime. Freedom fight has to become a common cause for the democratic world and new instruments have to be found to prevent broad daylight cruelties of dictators.
For years, Freedom House has documented the alarming decline of democracy worldwide. This trend indicates not only a rise in authoritarian regimes but also their increasing brutality and arrogance - enabled by the democratic world’s failure to counter them effectively.
Belarus stands as a glaring example of crimes against humanity unfolding in broad daylight yet largely neglected or ignored. The country’s strategic importance to both regional and international security cannot be overstated. The rise of post-Soviet authoritarianism in Europe began in Belarus. Lukashenko’s methods were later adopted by Putin, paving the way for Russia’s current aggression. Without Lukashenko’s cooperation, Putin might not have launched his war against Ukraine, using Belarusian territory as a staging ground for attacks.
The West possesses powerful leverage against dictators - it is time to use it. Sanctions should be imposed and explicitly tied to the unconditional release of all political prisoners in Belarus. If these demands are not met, sanctions must be intensified.
It has become clear that gross human rights violations are not just a humanitarian issue but a direct threat to global security. Dictators understand only the language of strength, not weak attempts at appeasement. By taking decisive action and supporting Belarusians in their struggle for freedom, the democratic world will not only uphold human rights but also ensure its own security and stability.
The views expressed in these works are the responsibility of its authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forum 2000 Foundation or its staff.
