The Ukrainian people will be awarded the Sakharov Prize this year, the EU Parliament’s award for democracy and human rights. Represented by its President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and civil society, it is receiving the prize for its current struggles and suffering, Parliament Speaker Roberta Metsola said in Strasbourg on Wednesday. The imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and the Colombian Truth Commission were also nominated for the prize. Julian Assange was also nominated, as was the Colombian Truth Commission, which investigated the civil war in the country.
nominations
The “brave” Ukrainian people, represented by its President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other elected representatives, as well as civil society, were nominated because of their suffering and their resistance to the Russian attacks.
The €50,000 award will be presented on December 14th in Strasbourg during the last plenary session of the year. The prize is named after the Soviet dissident and physicist Andrei Sakharov, who died in 1989.
From 2017 to June of this year, the Colombian Truth Commission investigated human rights violations during the decades-long armed conflict between the guerrilla organization FARC, right-wing paramilitary groups and the army in the country. The commission’s nomination is intended to honor the victims of the civil war.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been imprisoned in Great Britain for three years, faces a prison sentence of up to 175 years in the USA because he published around 700,000 confidential documents on the activities of the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan on the WikiLeaks website from 2010. Among them was explosive information about the killing of civilians and the mistreatment of prisoners. In June 2022, after years of legal wrangling, the British government approved the extradition of the native Australian to the United States. However, his supporters hope that they can still stop the extradition by court.