2022 Nobel Peace Prize winners

2022 Nobel Peace Prize winners, The 2022 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded jointly to Ales Bialiatski, a Belarusian human rights activist and political prisoner; the Center for Civil Liberties, a Ukrainian organization that promotes democracy and civil society; and Memorial, a Russian human rights organization that was shuttered by Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. The Prize for Peace is conferred by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

The committee’s decision to recognize groups from these specific countries came at a time when Russia, with assistance from Belarus, was prosecuting a war of aggression against Ukraine. It was against the backdrop of Europe’s largest conflict since World War II that the committee chose to focus on the importance of civil society in preserving international order, noting that when “civil society must give way to autocracy and dictatorship, peace is often the next victim.”

Ales Bialiatski

Ales Bialiatski, born in 1962, had an unlikely journey to the Nobel Peace Prize. It began with his university studies in literature in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union entered a period of more open expression. In 1986 Bialiatski cofounded a group of young writers that amplified Belarusian literature and cultural thought and corresponded with a broad awakening of Belarusian national identity.

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the leadership in Belarus lagged those in other post-Soviet states in liberalizing the country’s economy and political processes. Bialiatski remained active nonetheless, and, at first, Belarusian expression flourished. However, it soon drew ire from those in power as a vehicle for dissent. In the mid-1990s Belarus’s flirtation with openness ended. The government dismissed the Belarusian language as an underdeveloped variety of Russian and took action to suppress it. It was but one dimension in a series of power grabs that brought protesters to the streets—and resulted in a harsh government crackdown—in the spring of 1996. Bialiatski helped found Viasna-96 (“Spring-96”) to provide assistance to those detained for their participation in the demonstrations. Later that year Alexander Lukashenko assumed sweeping powers. Viasna-96 continued its work on behalf of political prisoners and eventually expanded its scope, changing its name to Viasna Human Rights Centre.

It was Bialiatski’s persistent activism with Viasna that led to his imprisonment in 2011. Early that year protests against a disputed election, a bomb attack in Minsk, and a sharply declining economy left the country in an unprecedented state of tension. In August Bialiatski was arrested and was later convicted on charges relating to alleged tax evasion in the funding of Viasna; Bialiatski denied the charges. He was released in 2014. When in 2020 Belarus again faced an unprecedented level of unrest—this time in response to Lukashenko’s dismissive handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and his overt interference in the run-up to the presidential election—Bialiatski was one of many Belarusian dissenters who were detained. By the end of his second year in detention, no trial had been held, and the charges were being kept under wraps. It was unclear, according to some colleagues at Viasna, if Bialiatski was aware that he had won the peace prize.

The Center for Civil Liberties

The Center for Civil Liberties was founded in Kyiv in 2007 by the leaders of human rights organizations from nine former Soviet countries in an attempt to create a cross-border resource center. Its formal mission is “The establishment of human rights, democracy, and solidarity in Ukraine and the OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] region for the affirmation of human dignity.” More generally, the organization works to buttress civil society and further the rule of law in pursuit of full-fledged democracy in Ukraine.

It undertook that pursuit during a tumultuous period in Ukraine’s history when the country shifted from Moscow toward the West, especially after the Maidan uprising of 2013–14, which led to the fall of Pres. Viktor Yanukovych. It began documenting human rights abuses and crimes against humanity that were committed by the Yanukovych regime during that uprising and extended that monitoring to abuses committed by Russian-backed forces in Crimea, during events leading to the region’s annexation by Russia, and in eastern Ukraine, when conflict erupted there in 2014. The organization has also mapped the disappearance of activists and journalists in Ukraine since 2014. Its efforts to document war crimes and human rights abuses only intensified after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Center for Civil Liberties is led by Oleksandra Matviychuk, who received the Democracy Defender Award from the OSCE in 2016.

Memorial

Memorial was founded as the Group for the Preservation of the Memory of Soviet Repression Victims in Moscow in August 1987. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”) had ushered in a new era of examination and criticism of the Soviet state, and Memorial sought to account for the abuses and excesses of the communist era. In time it would become one of Russia’s most respected human rights organizations.

The group’s first chair was dissident and 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrey Sakharov, and in 1989 the Moscow Memorial chapter united several other organizations under the umbrella of the All-Union Voluntary History and Education Society Memorial. In addition to reckoning with the crimes and legacy of the Stalinist regime, Memorial advocated for international human rights. One of its first public actions was a protest at the Chinese embassy in Moscow against the bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, Memorial assisted the government’s transition to democracy. Members helped draft a law on the rehabilitation of victims of political repression, and they served as witnesses in the trial against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the wake of the failed 1991 coup by Communist hardliners. Throughout the 1990s observers from Memorial would document human rights abuses in conflicts in the North Caucasus and Chechnya. This decade also saw a raft of publications and museum exhibitions as Memorial uncovered details about the Gulag system, the KGB, and the NKVD. In 2003 the group published a database of more than 1.3 million victims of Soviet state terror; in time this list would more than double.

Memorial would not enjoy such a close relationship with the Russian government in the 21st century, and Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin would take steps to reduce the group’s influence. These actions became especially noticeable after 2007, when Memorial began hosting conferences to mark the imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian billionaire and Putin foe, whose prosecution was seen by many as politically motivated. In 2013 Russia adopted legislation that required any nongovernmental organization (NGO) that engaged in “political activity” and received funding from abroad to register as a “foreign agent.” Memorial was among the NGOs that refused to register under the new law, pointing out that “foreign agent” carried Cold War connotations of “foreign spy.” The next year Putin’s justice ministry filed a lawsuit before the Russian Supreme Court to close Memorial down. In 2016 Memorial was added to the Russian government’s list of “foreign agents,” and in 2021 the Russian Supreme Court ordered the closure of the organization.