Natallia Pinchuk

Natallia Pinchuk is wife of Ales Bialiatski, Belarusian human rights activist who (with the Center for Civil Liberties and Memorial) won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2022. Ales Bialiatski has worked to promote democracy and human rights in Belarus since the 1980s. He founded the organization Viasna (Spring) that from the 1990s has been documenting the authorities’ abuses against and torture of political prisoners and providing support to political prisoners and their families. As a result of Ales Bialiatski’s work, the government authorities sought to silence him. In 2011, they sentenced him to several years’ imprisonment for alleged tax evasion. He was released in 2014. In June 2021, in the wake of the massive demonstrations against President Lukashenko’s dictatorship that broke out after the presidential election in August 2020, Ales Bialiatski was again jailed. He is sentenced to 10 years in prison. While Ales remains in prison, together with over 1500 other political prisoners in Belarus, his wife Natallia continues with her effort to bolster international solidarity with human rights defenders and political prisoners. She has a historian and an educator. For over 20 years, she was teaching history at universities and educational institutions in Belarus until she was forced to leave the country in 2021.