The Vaclav Havel Prize for the defense of human rights was awarded to the head of the opposition in Venezuela Maria Corina Machado the Council of Europe.
Machado, 56 years old, who lives in a secret location in Venezuelaafter the controversial re-election of the president Nicolás Maduro in July, she was nominated for the award against Azerbaijani activist Akif Gurbanov and Georgian feminist Babucha Pataraia.
Machado dedicated his award to “those who fight (…) for freedom in Venezuela”.
“The importance of this award is enormous, not only for me, but for all those who fight together, today, for the cause of freedom in Venezuela,” he said in a live video.
He went into exile
Machado, whose victory was confirmed by the Federal Supreme Court on August 22, was declared the winner with 52% of the votes by the national electoral board, which, however, did not publish the minutes of the polling stations.
According to the opposition, which released the vote count by the electoral commission’s own members, its candidate Edmundo González Urrutia obtained more than 60% of the votes. Facing the threat of arrest in his country, he went into exile in Spain, which granted him asylum.
Dead in protests
After the announcement of Maduro’s re-election, Protests broke out, resulting in the deaths of 27 people and the injury of 192 others. Around 2,400 people were also arrested, according to an official source.
Around seven out of every 30 million Venezuelans have fled the country since 2014 due to the political and economic crisis, and experts expect a new wave of migration.
- The Vaclav Havel Prize, worth 60 thousand euros, has honored a civil society figure since 2013 for “remarkable actions in favor of human rights in Europe and beyond”, recalls the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Vaclav Havel, anti-totalitarian activist, eternal symbol of opposition to despotism and president of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic from 1989 to 2003, died on December 18, 2011, aged 75.
Source: AMPE
