26 Nobel Prize Winners Call For Restrictive Measures Against Lukashenka Regime

The open letter is addressed to the governments of all EU member states.

26 Nobel Prize Winners signed a call for the immediate release of Belarusian political prisoners. Belarusian author Svetlana Aleksievich, Ukrainian human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk, Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov and others are among them.

The appeal mentions that over the past four years, more than 50,000 people have been repressed in Belarus, hundreds of thousands have been forced to leave the country, and thousands have been tortured.

"Hundreds of journalists, professors, teachers, doctors, musicians, workers and students, public figures and human rights activists, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, are among them.

Entire families, mothers with many children, minors, seriously ill, elderly and disabled people are now being held in terrible conditions. Over the past decades, Europe has not seen a humanitarian catastrophe associated with political repression on such a scale per capita as in Belarus," the signatories note.

They call on the governments of the EU member states, and above all Poland, "to take urgent measures to end the harsh repression in Belarus and pressure for the release of all political prisoners." In particular, Poland is offered such measures as “a temporary suspension of regular rail freight traffic to the EU from Belarus, including transit from Russia and China.”

The appeal reads that there are legal grounds for imposing tougher sanctions against the Lukashenka regime — for example, the resolution of the International Labor Organization of June 12, 2023 (giving effect to paragraph 33 of the ILO Charter).

"This resolution calls on the governments of all countries of the world to impose any restrictive measures against the Lukashenka regime for systematic violations of labor and trade union rights," the document reads.

It is worth noting that there are much more political prisoners in Belarus than the figure presented by human rights organizations. The Investigative Committee announced more than 10,000 criminal cases linked to protests, which makes it possible to assess the real scale of repression.

Human rights activists are simply not able to count the number of political prisoners in Belarus and there are many questions about the criteria they use in assessing the people who are being imprisoned today.