VU Experts Help Understand: Nobel Peace Prize Demonstrates Awareness about the Fight for Human Rights in Eastern Europe

Friday afternoon, it was announced that the Nobel Peace Prize has been 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. According to the political scientist and lecturer at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University (VU TSPMI), the message this award sends to the broader world is that the fight for human rights is high significance in this region. Still, in his view, the Commission also went for a geopolitically cautious option.

Emphasis on Human Rights in the Region, Free of Geopolitics

‘I am pleased to see that the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to renowned human rights organisations and colleagues with whom I have worked and continue to work. The prize underscores the importance of both human rights and non-violent resistance while clearly demonstrating the understanding that this fight is significant in Eastern Europe,’ says Jurkonis.

Although this recognition should serve as an inspiration for other human rights defenders in Belarus and the region as a whole, the Nobel Prize Committee, according to Jurkonis, was obviously trying to steer clear of the current geopolitical context, awarding the prize to human rights defenders in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia together.

Bialiatski’s Multiple Accolades for Defending Human Rights

‘Equally, it seems the committee tried to avoid appearing overly political because early considerations mostly focused on names such as Volodymyr Zelensky, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and Alexei Navalny. The defenders of human rights have undoubtedly deserved their prize, but given all the nominees, it would seem that the committee consciously chose the more cautious option,’ says Jurkonis.

According to Jurkonis, Bialiatski is undoubtedly one of Belarus’s most-experienced human rights defenders and civil society leaders. Although best known as the face and director of the Viasna Human Rights Center (established in 1996), Bialiatski also rose to prominence as one of the initiators of the Belarusian pro-democratic movement in the mid-1980s.

Helping Families of Political Prisoners

Currently a political prisoner, he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on multiple occasions and received other prizes in the area of human rights. Bialiatski was arrested and imprisoned during the 2020 protests in Belarus, which broke out following the announcement of the Belarusian presidential election results.

The authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko had been declared the winner for his sixth consecutive term, having supposedly defeated the opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

‘In this context, it is worth remembering a fairly recent event, of 2011, when the data provided by Lithuania and Poland to the Belarusian government became a pretext for the court sentence against Bialiatski in his own country. The details of Bialiatski’s accounts were given to Minsk by Poland’s National Public Prosecutor's Office and Lithuania’s Ministry of Justice,’ says Jurkonis.

In November of the same year, Bialiatski was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for alleged tax evasion, treating the support gathered for families of political prisoners as his personal income. Vilnius and Warsaw later admitted this was a mistake and apologised to Bialiatski’s family.