Ales BIALIATSKI
Image Credit: Michał Józefaciuk/WikkiCommons
Writer released into exile
Writer, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski was freed from a 10-year prison sentence on 13 December 2025 and forced into exile in Norway, via Lithuania, alongside several other Belarusian writers and journalists, following negotiations between Belarus and the USA over lifting economic sanctions.
Detained on 14 July 2021, alongside several Viasna colleagues, following raids by Belarusian law enforcement officers on more than a dozen civil society and human rights organisations, Bialiatski was convicted on 3 March 2023 of fabricated charges of ‘smuggling’ and ‘organising and financing group actions that grossly violate public order’ (Articles 228.4 and 342.2 of the Belarusian Criminal Code) and sentenced to 10 years. His sentence was upheld on appeal on 21 April 2023 (see Case Lists 2021-2025). Held in a medium-security penal colony in Horki – a facility known for inmates being beaten and subjected to hard labour – he was reportedly prevented from receiving packages and medicine and in urgent need of medical care at the time of his release.
On 21 May 2023, the International Day of Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Belarus, PEN International published a letter signed by 103 Nobel Laureates, expressing solidarity with Bialiatski. In May 2024, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention to be arbitrary and called for his immediate release.
Bialiatski has been targeted by Belarusian authorities for years. In 2011, he was sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment; he was amnestied in June 2014 (see Case Lists 2011-2014).
Ales Bialiatski, born on 25 September 1962, is a literary scholar, essayist, and human rights defender. He was a founding member of the Belarusian literary organisation Tutejshyja (The Locals) and formerly served as head of the Maxim Bahdanovich Literary Museum in Minsk. In April 1996, he founded the Viasna Human Rights Centre, an organisation that campaigns for opposition activists who are harassed and persecuted by the Belarusian authorities. Bialiatski was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2022 alongside the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center for Civil Liberties.