World News | Nobel laureate: No lasting peace in Ukraine without justice

COPENHAGEN, Dec. 8 (AP) – The head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, who arrived in Oslo on Thursday to receive the Nobel Peace Prize with other human rights activists, said Ukraine will only have a lasting future until justice and human rights are done. Peace comes from Belarus and Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin “thinks he can do what he wants,” Oleksandra Matviichuk told reporters upon arrival at Oslo airport. “There will be no lasting peace in our region until we have justice.”

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“Human rights and peace are inextricably linked,” Matviichuk said. “A country that systematically violates human rights not only against its own citizens, but against the whole region, the whole world. Russia is a good example,” she said, according to Norwegian news agency NTB.

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was shared between jailed Belarusian rights activist Ales Bialiatski, Russian group Memorial and the Center for Civil Liberties. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said the laureates “have made outstanding efforts to document war crimes, human rights violations and abuse of power. Together they have demonstrated the importance of civil society to peace and democracy.”

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The award was seen as a strong condemnation of Putin’s authoritarian rule.

“We received this award during a war that started in 2014 and has escalated into a bloody and brutal conflict,” Matviichuk said, adding that winning the Nobel Peace Prize “requires great responsibility”.

Jan Laczynski, president of the International Commemorative Committee, who also arrived in Oslo on Thursday to accept the award, said the situation in Ukraine reminded him of what happened in Russia during World War II, and what his own relatives were going through then: lack of electricity, heat, food.

“Our most important message is that the world must respond more strongly to human rights violations,” he told reporters at the airport, according to NTB.

Ales Bialiatski’s wife, Natallia Pinchuk, will accept the prize on behalf of her husband, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

Bilyatsky, who founded the NGO Vyasna Center for Human Rights, was detained after protests in 2020 against the re-election of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko. He remains in custody without trial and faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted.

The Peace Prize will be awarded in the Norwegian capital on Saturday, while the other Nobel Prizes will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm at the same time, in line with the wishes of the prize’s founder, Alfred Nobel. The prize is always awarded on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.

Each award includes a diploma, a gold medal and a cash prize of SEK 10 million (approximately US$967,000), to be shared among the winners. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)