Explained | All about the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize

Source: The post is based on the article “Explained | All about the winners of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize” published in The Hindu on 8^th October 2022.

What is the News?

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2022 has been jointly awarded to Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Centre for Civil Liberties. The award was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

About Nobel Peace Prize for 2022

The Peace Prize laureates have, for many years, promoting the right to criticise power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens.

They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power.

Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy.

What are the individual contributions that led to Nobel Peace Prize for 2022?

Ales Bialiatski: He is the founder of Viasna, a human rights centre in Belarus.

President Alexander Lukashenko, who took over the country in 1994, gradually becameincreasingly autocratic. His rule has been described as “Europe’s last dictatorship”. In 1996, locals protested against Mr. Lukashenko’s rule in large numbers, and the uprising was popularly called the Minsk Spring.

Viasna’s registration was cancelled by the Supreme Court of Belarus in 2003. In 2004, it became a member of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

Bialiatski was arrested many times, but he has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus.

Note: At present also, he is detained without trial under very hard conditions. 

Bialiatski was also awarded the Right Livelihood Award, nicknamed the alternative Nobel Prize, in 2020.

Memorial: It is a Russian human rights organisation started in 1987 in the erstwhile Soviet Union. The organisation was started as a movement to expose repression under the regime. Eventually, it expanded into civil society groups that ran a museum, a library, an archive, and support centres to help Soviet-era repression victims and their family members. At present, Memorial is working on the compilation of information on political repression and human rights violations in Russia.

Centre for Civil Liberties: It is a Ukrainian human rights organisation for Civil Liberties, founded in Kyiv in 2007. It aims to transform the country into a full democracy. In 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, the Centre for Civil Liberties participated in mobile monitoring groups in Crimea as well as Donbas. The organisation is presently focused on identifying and documenting Russian war crimes following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.