Belarusian human rights activis Ales Bialiatski speaks after he and the Belarusian human rights organization Vjasna were awarded the 2020 Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm on December 3, 2020.
Anders Wiklund | Afp | Getty Images
Belarusian human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, Russian human rights organization Memorial and the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties have been awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Bialiatski, 60, helped spark the democracy movement that began in Belarus in the 1980s. He has been in prison since 2021 on charges of tax evasion widely considered to be politically motivated. He served a prison sentence from October 2011 to June 2014 on the same charge.
The Nobel committee said he had “devoted his life to promoting democracy and peaceful development in his home country.”
The Center for Civil Liberties was founded in 2017 to support Ukrainian civil society, promote human rights and campaign for democracy.
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of six awards given each year since 1901 by a five-person committee elected by the Norwegian parliament. It is intended to recognize those who have “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.”
This year, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to French author Annie Ernaux.
Within the sciences, the prize for physics went to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for “pioneering quantum information science”; the prize for chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless for work in “click” chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry; and the prize for medicine went to Svante Pääbo for decoding the genome of Neandertals.
The economics prize will be announced Monday.
This is a breaking news story. More information to follow.