More than two dozen Nobel prize winners have slammed the “human catastrophe” of repression in Belarus in an open letter demanding the immediate release of political prisoners in the authoritarian country, reports The Independent.
Oscar Arias Sanchez, the former president of Cost Rica; Jose Ramos-Horta president of East Timor; Dmitry Muratov, the journalist and former editor-in-chief of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta and Oleksandra Matviichuk, the Ukrainian human rights lawyers are among the signatories.
The letter, launched by activist Dzmitry Balkunets and posted on his website, says that over the past four years, more than 50,000 people have been subjected to political repression in Belarus while hundreds of thousands of citizens have been forced to leave the country. Thousands have also been tortured.
Journalists, professors, educators, doctors, musicians, workers, and students, public figures and human rights defenders, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Ales Bialiatski are among those locked up in Belarus.