English

Lech Walesa Award granted to imprisoned Ales Byalyatski

The Lech Walesa Institute in Gdansk, Poland, has granted its prestigious award to Ales Byalyatski, the imprisoned chairman of a Belarusian human rights group called Vyasna (Spring).

The Lech Walesa Award has been bestowed on the 50-year-old Byalyatski in recognition of his "actions for the democratisation of the Republic of Belarus, his active promotion of human rights and aid provided for persons currently persecuted by Belarusian authorities," according to the Lech Walesa Institute.

Mr. Byalyatski's wife, Natallya Pinchuk, will be presented with the award in Gdansk on September 29.

Mr. Byalyatski has also been nominated for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize and this year's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
On September 25, Ms. Pinchuk received the US Department of State's 2011 Human Rights Defenders Award on behalf of her husband.

Lech Walesa is a co-founder of Solidarnosc (Solidarity), an independent trade union that played a key role in the collapse of Communism in Poland. Mr. Walesa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983, and served as president of Poland between 1990 and 1995.

Ales Byalyatski, who is vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, was arrested in Minsk on August 4, 2011.

On November 24, 2011, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on a charge of large-scale tax evasion. The charge stemmed from information about his bank accounts abroad, which was thoughtlessly provided by authorities in Lithuania and Poland under interstate legal assistance agreements. During his trial, Mr. Byalyatski insisted that the money transferred by various foundations to his bank accounts abroad had been intended to finance Vyasna's activities and therefore could not be viewed as his income subject to taxation.