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EU prize highlights Russia murders of rights workers

euobserver.com
October 22, 2009

By ANDREW RETTMAN

22.10.2009 @ 12:12 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Moscow-based NGO Memorial has walked away with the EU's 2009 Sakharov prize for freedom of thought after a bloody year for human rights activists in Russia.

"We hope to contribute to ending the circle of fear and violence surrounding human rights defenders in the Russian Federation," European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said while announcing the decision on Thursday (22 October).


A makeshift tribute to Ms Estemirova following her death in July (Photo: tigreclaws)

 

 

 

 

 


The Pole and former anti-Communist campaigner added that he felt "personal satisfaction" over the award as "a man who comes from Solidarity and who saw Poland fighting for truth and freedom, which it finally won in the 1980s."

Three Memorial staff, Oleg Orlov, Sergei Kovalev and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, will be invited to collect the prize, which comes with a €50,000 cheque, at the EU parliament on 16 December.

Placards and posters highlighting the NGO will also be hung around EU buildings in Brussels over the coming year to remind officials of the significance of its work.

Memorial was founded in the 1980s by the eponymous Andrei Sakharov in order to document Stalinist-era crimes in Russia. But it has since grown into a broader movement of human rights defenders across Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Tajikistan, Moldova and Ukraine.

One of the NGO's board members, Natalya Estemirova, who worked in Chechnya, was on the morning of 15 July dragged screaming into a car and later found dead with bullet wounds to the chest and head in nearby woodland.

Her murder caused international outrage on a par with the slaying of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. But it was just one of several this year.

In January, human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov was shot dead in broad daylight on a Moscow street a few hundred metres from the Kremlin. In August, children's charity workers Alik Dzhabrailov and his wife Zarema Sadulayeva were abducted and killed in the Chechen capital Grozny. None of the perpetrators have been brought to justice.

The 2009 shortlist was not without other heroic figures.

Runner-up Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor and peace campaigner who lost three daughters when an Israeli shell hit his appartment in Gaza in January. The second runner-up, Dawit Isaak, is an Eritrean-origin Swedish reporter who has been in jail without trial in Eritrea since 2001.

 

See also:

the origrnal
Human Rights

euobserver.com
October 22, 2009