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
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