On Friday, a court condemned Belarus' foremost human rights champion and one of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize recipients to ten years in jail, news agency Associated Press (AP) reported.
Ales Bialiatski and three of his colleagues were sentenced harshly in reaction to large demonstrations over a 2020 election that would have given autocratic President Aleksandr Lukashenko a second term.
Lukashenko, a longstanding Russian friend who supported Putin's invasion of Ukraine, has controlled the ex-Soviet nation with an iron grip since 1994. More than 35,000 people were detained, and hundreds were assaulted by police in the country's greatest crackdown on protestors in history.
Belarus is an exception in its support for Russia's year-old invasion, with other countries in the region vocally opposing Moscow.
Bialiatski and his colleagues at the Viasna human rights centre he created were convicted of funding public order violations and smuggling, according to Viasna.
Valiantsin Stefanovich was sentenced to nine years in jail, Uladzimir Labkovicz to seven years, and Dzmitry Salauyou to eight years in prison in absentia.
The 60-year-old Bialiatski and his colleagues were detained in a caged enclosure in the courtroom for the trial, which took place behind closed doors. They have been imprisoned for 21 months after their capture.
Bialiatksi appeared gaunt but calm in images from the courtroom issued Friday by Belarus' national news agency Belta.
Following the decision, Viasna stated that all four activists have maintained their innocence.
In his final speech to the court, he begged the authorities to "stop the civil war in Belarus." According to Bialiatski, the case files revealed that "the investigators were completing the objective they were given: to deprive Viasna human rights activists of freedom at whatever cost, ruin Viasna, and halt our activity."
Exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya called the court judgement "appalling" on Friday.
“We must do everything to fight against this shameful injustice (and) free them,” Tsikhaouskaya tweeted.
The penalty imposed on Bialiatski and his comrades sparked indignation in the Western world.
The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, a nongovernmental group dedicated to ensuring that human rights are upheld in practise, stated that it was "shocked by the cynicism behind the sentences that were recently imposed to our Belarusian friends in Minsk."
”The trial shows how Lukashenka’s regime punishes our colleagues, human rights defenders, for standing up against the oppression and injustice,” Secretary General Berit Lindeman was quoted by AP in its report.
The procedures against the activists, according to German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, were "a farce."
“The Minsk regime is fighting civil society with force and prison. This is just as much a daily disgrace as Lukashenko’s support for Putin’s war. We call for the end of political persecution and freedom for the more than 1,400 political prisoners," she added.
Bialiatski is just the fourth individual in the Nobel Prize's 121-year history to accept the prize while imprisoned or detained.
(With Inputs From AP)