A trio of human rights champions from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a highly symbolic choice of laureates drawn from three nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine.

The honour went to detained activist Ales Bialiatski of Belarus, Russia's Memorial group and Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties.

"They have made an outstanding effort to document war crimes, human right abuses and the abuse of power. Together they demonstrate the significance of civil society for peace and democracy", the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen, told reporters.

The committee called on Belarus to release Bialiatski, 60, who has been jailed since 2021.

Bialiatski's wife said she was "overwelmed with emotion" after the news.

While the prize was not a direct message to Putin, Reiss-Andersen called his regime an "authoritarian government that is suppressing human rights activists" and that the committee wanted to highlight he "way civil society and human rights advocates are being suppressed."

Last year, the Peace Prize crowned two champions of freedom of the press, Philippine journalist Maria Ressa and her Russian colleague Dmitry Muratov.

The prize comes with a gold medal, a diploma and a prize sum of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $900,000).

- 'Not yielded an inch' -

The award will be presented at a formal ceremony in Oslo on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of the prizes' creator, Swedish inventor and philanthropist Alfred Nobel.

Reiss-Andersen said she hoped Bialiatski would be able to attend.

"We do hope... that he can come to Oslo and receive the honour bestowed upon him", she said.

Bialiatski was imprisoned from 2011 to 2014, and was again arrested following large-scale demonstrations against the regime in 2020.

"He is still detained without trial. Despite tremendous personal hardship, Mr Bialiatski has not yielded an inch in his fight for human rights and democracy in Belarus", the Nobel committee said.

Memorial is meanwhile the largest human rights organisation in Russia. Russia's Supreme Court ordered the group's central structure, called Memorial International, dissolved in December 2021.

In addition to establishing a centre of documentation on victims of the Stalinist era, Memorial compiled and systematised information on political oppression and human rights violations in Russia.

It became the most authoritative source of information on political prisoners in Russian detention facilities.

The organisation has also been standing at the forefront of efforts to combat militarism and promote human rights and government based on rule of law.

Both Bialiatski and Memorial have been mentioned in Nobel speculation in previous years.

After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, the Center for Civil Liberties, founded in 2007, has engaged in efforts to identify and document Russian war crimes against the Ukrainian civilian population.

"In collaboration with international partners, the center is playing a pioneering role with a view to holding the guilty parties accountable for their crimes", the committee said.

The Peace Prize is the only Nobel awarded in Oslo, with the other disciplines announced in Stockholm.

On Thursday, French author Annie Ernaux, known for her deceptively simple novels drawing on personal experience of class and gender, won the Nobel Literature Prize.

She is the 17th woman to get the nod out of 119 literature laureates since 1901.

Earlier in the week, the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were announced. The 2022 Nobel season winds up Monday with the announcement of the winner of Nobel Economics Prize.

Bialiatski: veteran rights defender in authoritarian Belarus
Moscow (AFP) Oct 7, 2022 - Ales Bialiatski, the head of Belarus rights group Viasna who was jailed last year, won the Nobel Peace Prize in the wake of historic demonstrations and a severe crackdown in his ex-Soviet country.

The 60-year-old was arrested in July last year on charges of tax evasion, a move that critics of Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko saw as a thinly veiled tactic to silence his work.

Bialiatski's organisation, which translates to "Spring" and was founded in 1996, is Belarus's most prominent rights group, whose work has charted the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of Lukashenko and his security forces.

Established during mass pro-democracy protests several years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it sought to help detained protesters and their families.

In the years since, Viasna and Bialiatski have gained prominence as Lukashenko's regime has leaned on more brutal ways of retaining its tight grip on power.

When massive rallies broke out across the country against Lukashenko's claim to a sixth presidential term in August 2020, Viasna meticulously tracked numbers of people detained at protests and after police raids across Belarus in the months afterwards.

In the wake of the vote, Bialiatski described "real terror" taking hold of regional towns and in the capital Minsk as authorities worked to quash dissent.

"The goal is very simple -- to retain power at any cost and instill fear in society so that there are no protests against the falsification of these elections," he said.

Bialiatski was also part of a council of opposition figures -- that included previous Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich -- tasked with organising new free and fair elections.

But in July 2021, Lukashenko's crackdown came to his doorstep with coordinated raids on a wide range of civil society groups, including Viasna's offices and Bialiatski's home, in a sweep that the group called a "new wave" of repression.

Viasna said last year that apart from Bialiatski, six of its members who were arrested following the elections were in jail.

- Another birthday behind bars -

"The brutal crackdown on Viasna is part of the wider 'purge' of civil society declared by President Alexander Lukashenko," Human Rights Watch said last year.

It was not the first time Bialiatski had run into trouble with security forces in Belarus, which is often described as "Europe's last dictatorship".

In August 2011, he was handed a 4.5-year prison sentence for tax evasion in a move widely seen as politically motivated in the wake of an earlier presidential election claimed by Lukashenko.

At the time, a court ruled that Viasna had to vacate offices it used for the previous 12 years.

Bialiatski was released from that prison sentence in 2014, 18 months early.

"During his 25 years of activism, Bialiatski has faced serial repression," Human Rights Watch said last year after his pretrial detention was extended.

Bialiatski has also authored several books.

His activism has been recognised with several awards, mostly from Western institutions, including the Andrei Sakharov Freedom Award. He was previously nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times.

He was born in 1962 in a region of the Soviet Union near Finland and served in the military before studying philology.

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