Ales Bialiatski is a Belarusian human rights defender, has been campaigning for democracy and human rights in Belarus for over 30 years. He is a founding member (1996) and head of the Viasna Human Rights Centre. He is vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights. Bialiatski has received the Homo Homini Award and the Per Anger Prize for his efforts in promoting human rights and democracy. In 2014 he received the Civil Rights Defender of the Year Award. In October 2020, Ales Bialiatski was one of the 2020 recipients of the Right Livelihood Award, an award often referred to as the “alternative Nobel Prize”. Ales Bialiatski is one of the members of the Coordination Council, set up in August 2020 by opposition and civil society figures to facilitate dialogue and overcome the political crisis in the country. Ales Bialiatski was arrested by Belarusian authorities on tax evasion charges on 4 August 2011 and sentenced to 4.5 years in prison on 24 November. A scholar of Belarusian literature, Ales Bialiatski was a founding member of the Tutejshyja Association of Young Writers and served as the group’s chair from 1986–1989. Actively involved in anti-Soviet protests in the 1980s, he helped organize a memorial ceremony at Kurapaty, the site of thousands of killings by the NKVD in the late 1930s. Bialiatski was also one of the founding members of the Belarusian Popular Front.