Raif Badawi, a blogger and activist who has been imprisoned and publicly flogged for criticizing Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment, on Thursday was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the EU’s top human rights award.
European Parliament President Martin Schulz, who announced the award, called Badawi “an extremely good man, an exemplary man who has had imposed on him one of the most gruesome penalties,” one that “can only really be described as brutal torture.”
Schulz urged the Saudi king to “immediately grant mercy to Mr Badawi and to free him so that he can accept the prize.”
Photo: AFP
“In the case of Mr Badawi, fundamental human rights are not only not being respected, they are being trodden underfoot,” he added.
Badawi, 31, was arrested in 2012 — on charges that included apostasy, cybercrime and disobeying his father — after he started a Web site that criticized the Saudi religious establishment. In 2013, he was sentenced to seven years in prison and 600 lashes. The next year, he was resentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes. (He was not convicted of apostasy, which carries a death sentence.)
On Jan. 9, Badawi received his first 50 lashes at a mosque outside the port city of Jidda.
His wife, Ensaf Haidar, said this week that Saudi contacts had told her that a second round of flogging — which had been delayed because of concerns about Badawi’s health — was imminent.
Haidar and the couple’s three children live in Canada, where they sought asylum.
“Raif would be very happy to see the extent to which his fight is shared by so many people in the world, and this award is further evidence of that,” Haidar said in a statement on Thursday.
Badawi’s case has become a cause celebre among human rights observers.
Officials at the UN, the US and other Western powers have condemned his sentencing, as have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
This month, he was a co-recipient of the PEN Pinter Prize, a free-speech award established in 2009 in honor of the British playwright Harold Pinter.
Authorities also jailed Badawi’s lawyer, Waleed Abulkhair, the founder of a group called Monitor of Human Rights in Saudi Arabia. He was sentenced last year to 15 years in prison for undermining the government, inciting public opinion and insulting the judiciary.
Reached by telephone, an official at the Saudi mission to the EU in Brussels said the kingdom did not have a response to the announcement. He cited a past statement in which the Saudi authorities stated that their judicial system was independent and that it was not the place of outsiders to criticize it.
The prize, established in 1988, is named for the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, who led the Soviet Union’s development of the hydrogen bomb and then became a tireless crusader for human rights. Past winners include Nelson Mandela and Kofi Annan.
European lawmakers are invited each year to nominate candidates for the prize. Each nominee must have the support of at least 40 of the European Parliament’s 751 members.
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