Right Livelihood and Viasna demand accountability at UN Human Rights Council

Right Livelihood delivered a joint statement with 2020 Right Livelihood Laureate organisation Viasna at the 55th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva addressing the widespread human rights violations in Belarus. Ales Bialiatski, Right Livelihood Laureate and Viasna’s chairman, has been inhumanely detained as a political prisoner since November 2023.

You can read the entire joint statement here.

Since the 2020 elections in Belarus, human rights severely deteriorated. In the last four and a half years alone, 4,200 Belarusians have been arbitrarily detained with nearly 6,000 cases brought against individuals for political crimes.

As the country approaches its next presidential election, set for 2025, Right Livelihood and Viasna addressed the Council to raise concerns about the situation. The international community must hold Belarusian authorities responsible for repressing fundamental freedoms and mistreating political prisoners, we told the Council.

To achieve this, we recommended the Council renews the Special Rapporteur on Belarus’s mandate and establishes a fully independent investigative mechanism.

Political prisoners suffer greatly under Belarus’s current regime. They are denied medical care and meals, kept indoors, and punished with manual labour. Laureate Ales Bialiatski and Viasna member Valentin Stefanovich are just two examples of the regime’s inhumane treatment, we told the Council.

Bialiatski has been placed in a punishment cell for 1,000 days. He is routinely restricted from contacting his family and obtaining medication despite his chronic illness. Stefanovich has also been mistreated, raising concerns about the mental and physical health of political prisoners across the country. 

Belarusian authorities must be held accountable for its systemic repression of fundamental freedoms.