Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the prize on Monday. Václav Havel of Human Rightsis awarded each year by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Her daughter Ana Corina Sosa received the award on behalf of her mother, is in hiding due to threats from the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro.
“I deeply regret not being able to travel,” Assembly Speaker Theodoros Rousopoulos told Corina Machado, who connected via video call, announcing her name as the winner of the prize. This is the first time that the Council of Europe has awarded the Václav Havel Prize to someone from Latin America, since the organization first presented this award in 2013 to Belarusian human rights defender Ales Bialiatski.
The opposition leader stressed the importance of this prize for “all those who “They are individually fighting for the cause of freedom in Venezuela.” “The importance of this award is immense not only for me but for all those who fight together for the cause of freedom in Venezuela,” Corina Machado told the Council of Europe Assembly.
The other two nominees of this edition were Akif Gurbanov, political activist from Azerbaijan, co-founder of the Democratic Initiative Institute (IDI) and the Third Republic Platform, arrested in March this year during a demonstration; and Babutsa Pataraia, Georgian lawyer who has been fighting against femicide for more than a decade and director of the NGO Sapari.
Last year he was a journalist, activist and Turkish businessman Osman Kavalaimprisoned since 2017, who won the prize, worth 60,000 euros. In previous editions, it was won by the Russian opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza (2022), the rights activist for the Uyghur minority Ilham Tohti (2019) and the Yazidi Nadia Mourad (2016).
The Council of Europe, a body which is not part of the European Union, was founded in 1949 to promote continental integration, the rule of law and human rights, after World War II.
