EU parliament honours Arab Spring activists with Sakharov Prize

Dec 14, 2011, 14:09 GMT

Strasbourg - The European Parliament on Wednesday honoured five activists involved in pro-democracy uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia with its Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought.

'2011 will go down in history as the year of the Arab Spring,' the legislature's president, Jerzy Buzek, noted. 'The European Parliament recognizes the efforts of all those who struggle for dignity, basic freedoms and political change in the Arab world.'

Present to accept their awards were Asmaa Mahfouz, a co-founder of Egypt's April 6 movement - which helped ignite the revolution that led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak - and Ahmed al-Senussi, who spent 31 years in prison after an attempted coup on Libya's Moamer Gaddafi.

'This is a prize that goes out to all young Egyptians, those who sacrificed their lives ... in the name of liberty for everybody,' Mahfouz told European Union lawmakers during the award ceremony in Strasbourg, France. 'We will not betray them. We will ... make sure that this dream is fulfilled.'

'Years and years of dictatorship led young people to lay down their lives, shed their blood ... The only weapon they had was their conviction,' al-Senussi added. 'This prize has huge symbolic and moral value. It's something which the people of Libya appreciate.'

Syrian lawyer and blogger Razan Zeitouna was also honoured, but could not attend the award ceremony because she has gone into hiding after being accused by the regime of being a foreign agent.

'It is not possible to stop the march of this people to freedom and dignity,' Zeitouna wrote in a letter to EU lawmakers, dedicating the prize to 'Little Ghiyath,' the newborn son of an activist who was killed by Syrian security forces in September.

Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat had his hands broken by masked gunmen in August after comments he made denouncing the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

He thanked EU parliamentarians for his Sakharov Prize through a video message, saying that he felt 'extremely bitter and very sad' about the mounting number of deaths in Syria.

'People are demonstrating in the streets at the moment. They are not scared of dying ... They know how important the ultimate price is,' he said. 'They are telling us that liberty is a precious good.'

Also honoured posthumously was Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, who sparked the Arab Spring wave of pro-democracy protests after setting himself alight to protest police harassment.

The Sakharov Prize, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, has been handed out by the parliament since 1988. Its first recipient was South Africa's Nelson Mandela.

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