The award has echoes of the Cold War era, when prominent Soviet dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn won Nobels for peace or literature. The prize will be seen by many as a condemnation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was celebrating his 70th birthday on Friday, and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, making it one of the most politically contentious in decades.
“We believe that it is a war that is a result of an authoritarian regime, aggressively committing an act of aggression,” Norwegian Nobel Committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen told Reuters after the announcement. She said the committee wanted to honour “three outstanding champions of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence”.
“It is not one person, one organisation, one quick fix,” she said. “It is the united efforts of what we call civil society that can stand up against authoritarian states and, or, human rights abuses.” She called on Belarus to release Byalyatski. Asked whether the awards represented “a timely birthday president”, Reiss-Andersen said, “This prize is not addressing President Putin, not for his birthday or in any other sense — except that his government, as the government in Belarus, is representing an authoritarian government that is suppressing human rights activists.”
Belarusian security police detained Byalyatski, 60, and others in July last year in a new crackdown on opponents of Lukashenko. Authorities had moved to shut down non-state media outlets and human right groups after mass protests the previous August against a presidential election that the opposition said was rigged. Byalyatski’s wife said he may not even know of the news, which she tried to break to him in a telegram to a Belarusian prison.
“The (Nobel) Committee is sending a message that political freedoms, human rights and active civil society are part of peace,” Dan Smith, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said.
He said the prize would boost morale for Byalyatski and strengthen the hand of the Center for Civil Liberties, an independent Ukrainian human rights organisation, which is also focused on fighting corruption. “Although Memorial has been closed in Russia, it lives on as an idea that it’s right to criticise power and that facts and history matter,” Smith added.
In Geneva, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations said Moscow was not concerned about the award. “We don’t care about this,” Gennady Gatilov said. In Belarus, the award was not reported by state media.
Founded in 1989 to help the victims of political repression during the Soviet Union and their relatives, Memorial campaigns for democracy and civil rights in Russia and former Soviet republics. Its co-founder and first leader was Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Memorial, Russia’s best-known human rights group, was ordered to be dissolved last December for breaking a law requiring certain civil society groups to register as foreign agents, capping a year of crackdowns on Kremlin critics the likes of which had not been seen since Soviet days. “This award is a tribute to all of Russian civil society, which is in a terrible situation now,” Memorial co-chairman Oleg Orlov said. “In these depressing circumstances, this award will inspire us to continue our work.” Asked by reporters if it would help to protect his organisation or its work, he said “I fear not”.
Speaking after a Moscow court hearing to decide whether Memorial’s archives should be handed over to the state, Orlov said: “When one country crushes human rights, that country becomes a threat to the world. We are continuing our work defending human rights. It hasn’t stopped, it goes on.” The award to Memorial is the second in a row to a Russian person or organisation, after the prize last year went to journalist Dmitry Muratov and to Maria Ressa of the Philippines.
The Center for Civil Liberties in Ukraine has been pushing for the country to join the International Criminal Court. It has been involved in identifying and documenting Russia’s war crimes against civilians since Putin’s full-scale invasion in February, with its database listing more than 19,000 incidents by now. The executive director of the outfit, Oleksandra Romantsova, said winning the award was incredible. “It is great, thank you,” she told the secretary of the award committee, Olav Njoelstad, during a phone call that was filmed and broadcast on Norwegian television.
Byalyatski is the fourth person to win the peace prize while in detention, after Germany’s Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, China’s Liu Xiaobo in 2010 and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest in 1991.