Laureates honoured at Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo

Natalia Pinchuk, the wife of imprisoned Ales Bialiatski, Yan Rachinsky, chairman of Memorial and Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of Ukraine's Centre for Civil Liberties pose
Natalia Pinchuk, the wife of imprisoned Ales Bialiatski, Yan Rachinsky, chairman of Memorial and Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of Ukraine's Centre for Civil Liberties pose Copyright Markus Schreiber/AP
By Euronews with AP
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Winners and representatives attended the first Nobel Peace Prize ceremony since the pandemic began in Norway on Saturday. The event coincided with the UN's Human Rights Day and highlighted the erosion of human rights in Russia and Belarus and Russia's war in Ukraine.

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The co-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, including Russia's oldest human rights organisation, Memorial, Ukraine's Centre of Civil Liberties [CCL] and jailed Belarusian activist Ales Bialiatski, have been honoured 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 Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Belarus' 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 for Ukrainians, but for the other nations in 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," she said. "If Ukraine stops its resistance, there will be no more of us."

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

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

The triple prize has been seen as a strong rebuke of Putin and Lukashenko's crackdown on democracy.

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