MINSK -- Belarusian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Byalyatski and his three associates from the Vyasna human rights center have gone on trial in Minsk on smuggling and tax-evasion charges that rights defenders and Western governments call politically motivated retribution on the part of longtime authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
The Lenin district court in Minsk opened the trial of Byalyatski, Vyasna's chairman, his deputy Valyantsin Stefanovich, and the coordinator of Human Rights Defenders for Fair Elections, Uladzimer Labkovich, on January 5.
The defendants have been in custody since July 2021 and face up to 12 years in prison if convicted.
Representatives of several Western diplomatic missions in Minsk came to the court but were not allowed to attend the trial.
As the hearing started, the defendants demanded to have their handcuffs removed and that the trial be held in Belarusian, not in Russian.
The judge refused to meet their demands, but allowed them to use Belarusian in their testimonies, saying that everybody would understand them.
Russian and Belarusian are both official languages in Belarus.
The three men and a fourth defendant, Zmitser Salauyou, who is being tried in absentia, are accused of bringing money into the country for "illegal activities and financing Vyasna," the largest rights body in the former Soviet country and one of the main sources of information on political detentions and arrests.
Byalyatski, who has been fighting for democracy and human rights in his beleaguered homeland his entire life, was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize along with the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties and the embattled Russian group Memorial.
He founded the Vyasna Human Rights Center, which was originally a Minsk-based organization with the name Vyasna-96. In 1999, it was reborn as a national nongovernmental rights organization.
The Crisis In Belarus
Read our coverage as Belarusian strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka continues his brutal crackdown on NGOs, activists, and independent media following the August 2020 presidential election.
The NGO was outlawed by the Belarusian Supreme Court in October 2003 for its role in monitoring the country's 2001 presidential election. It has continued its work, however, as an unregistered NGO.
The main work of the organization has been defending and supporting political prisoners. The group -- and Byalyatski personally -- has regularly been harassed and persecuted by Lukashenka's government since its founding.
Belarusian authorities have moved to shut down critical and non-state media outlets and human rights bodies in the wake of mass protests that erupted in August 2020 after a presidential election the opposition said was rigged.
The opposition and Western governments say Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was driven into exile, won the vote, which has not been recognized by the United States, the European Union, and several other countries.
Thousands have been detained since the vote and there have been credible reports of the torture and ill-treatment of detainees by security forces. Several people have died during the crackdown.