Winners honored at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo

Natalia Pinchuk, wife of imprisoned Ales Bialiatski, Yan Rachinsky, president of Memorial and Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties pose ©Markus Schreiber/AP

Co-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, including Russia’s oldest human rights organization Memorial, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties [CCL] and imprisoned Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, were honored at an official awards ceremony in Oslo.

It comes as Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of Ukraine’s CCL, told reporters on Friday that the international community should bring Russian President Vladimir Putin and Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to justice.

“We must break the circle of impunity. We must establish an international tribunal and hold Putin, Lukashenko and other war criminals accountable, not only to Ukrainians, but to other nations of the world,” Matviichuk said.

The human rights lawyer says she is confident Putin will be tried “sooner or later”.

Founded in 2007, the Kyiv-based CCL documents war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine.

“This war has a genocidal character,” he said. “If Ukraine stops its resistance, there will be no more of us.”

Memorial, acclaimed for its studies of political repression, was shut down by Russia’s supreme court in December 2021 after the Duma declared the organization a foreign agent in 2016.

The imprisoned Bialiatski is the fourth person in the 121-year history of Nobel laureates to be awarded the prize while behind bars.

The triple award was seen as a stark rebuke to Putin’s and Lukashenko’s crackdown on democracy.