Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya wins the Four Freedoms Award

January 8, 2022

Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya will receive the Four Freedoms Award this year. The intention is that Tikhanovskaya will receive the prize on April 21 in Middelburg. For more on this award and its laureates, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/awards/CC8B97CB-FAE1-5A1F-68DB-0CE63E3306D0

Tikhanovskaya was the main rival to current President Lukashenko, who has ruled the country since 1994, in the 2020 Belarusian presidential election. Her husband, Sergei Tikhanovski, had originally wanted to run for president, but was arrested before he could run for office. Tikhanovskaya then took over his role.

After Belarusian state television released an exit poll showed Lukashenko winning by an overwhelming margin, Tsikhanouskaya said that she didn’t trust that poll, saying, “I believe my eyes, and I see that the majority is with us. She filed a formal complaint with the Central Election Commission on election night, but was detained for seven hours in retaliation. After her release from detention, Tsikhanouskaya chose to flee to Lithuania in fear of repercussions, which could have possibly affected her children.

Tsikhanouskaya and other Belarus leaders of the country’s democratic opposition were awarded the European Parliament’s 2020 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/10/22/belarus-opposition-movement-wins-eus-sakharov-prize-for-freedom-of-thought/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sviatlana_Tsikhanouskaya

https://www.pzc.nl/home/four-freedoms-award-voor-svetlana-tichanovskaja-situatie-in-belarus-wordt-met-de-dag-erger~aff02eaa/?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

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