Moscow (AFP) - Jailed Nobel Prize winner Ales Bialiatski went on trial in Minsk on Thursday in what supporters see as a bid to clamp down on Viasna, Belarus’s top rights group, which he founded.

Bialiatski, who was co-awarded last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, founded Viasna (Spring), the authoritarian country’s most prominent rights group, in 1996.

Bialiatski and his associates Valentin Stefanovich and Vladimir Labkovich could be seen in the defendants’ cage in the courtroom at the start of the hearing, images released by Russian news agency RIA Novosti showed.

Bialiatski was sitting on a bench wearing a black hoodie, green trousers and sneakers.

The two other defendants sat on either side of a bench behind him, looking solemn in the cage guarded by four armed policemen.

Bialiatski, 60, and his associates were jailed after large-scale demonstrations against the regime in 2020, when authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in elections denounced as fraudulent by the international community.

Backed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Lukashenko cracked down on the opposition movement, jailing his critics or pushing them into exile.

A fourth defendant, Dmitry Solovyov, is being tried in absentia after he fled to neighbouring Poland despite a travel ban.

“I do not trust this trial and what will happen in it… It is a fake trial,” he told AFP, calling the accusations “absurd” and dismissing the legal procedure as “theatre”.

“There is no law in Belarus, no rule of law. The process is entirely controlled by a gangster government,” he said.

The high-profile trial will be followed by those of independent journalists as well as Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the leader of the opposition movement, who lives in exile.

Bialiatski, Stefanovich and Labkovich have been in detention since July 2021, initially on charges of tax evasion.

Viasna said in November that the rights campaigners now stand accused of smuggling a “large amount of cash” into Belarus to allegedly fund opposition activities.

- ‘Revenge’ -

On Thursday, all three pleaded not guilty to the charges, which could see them sentenced to between seven and 12 years in prison.

Rights group Amnesty International called the trial a “blatant act of injustice” and “revenge for their activism”.

Lukashenko’s “administration is particularly vengeful against human rights activists and the outcome of the ‘trial’ seems destined to be cruel,” Amnesty added.

On Monday, several employees of Tut.by, the largest independent news outlet in Belarus, including its editor-in-chief Marina Zolotova, will go on trial.

They face several charges including tax evasion and “inciting enmity”, after the media outlet was designated “extremist” in 2021.

Belarusian-Polish journalist and activist Andrzej Poczobut, 49, will be put in the dock in the western city of Grodno on January 16.

He was detained in March 2021 on charges of incitement to hatred and “calls for actions aimed at causing harm to the national security of Belarus”, according to Viasna.

He faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted.

Tikhanovskaya, who claimed victory in Belarus’s contested 2020 presidential election, will face trial in absentia on January 17.

The 40-year-old, who now lives in Lithuania, faces a litany of charges including high treason, conspiracy to seize power in an unconstitutional way and creating and leading an extremist organisation.

She ran for the presidency in place of her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, a charismatic YouTube blogger who galvanised the opposition.

Authorities cut his campaign short by arresting him on charges of violating public order.

In 2021, he was found guilty of organising riots, inciting social hatred and other charges and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

According to Viasna, there were 1,448 political prisoners in Belarus as of December 31.