EU gives top human rights award to imprisoned journalists
The European Union gave its top human rights award Wednesday to two journalists imprisoned in their native countries of Belarus and Georgia.
Andrzej Poczobut, a Belarusian correspondent for the influential Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, is an outspoken critic of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko. Arrested amid a crackdown on dissent in 2020, he’s serving an eight-year sentence in the Novopolotsk penal colony, accused of “harming Belarus’s national security.”
Mzia Amaghlobeli, who founded two independent media outlets in Georgia, was sentenced to two years in prison for slapping a police chief during an anti-government protest in January. Supporters say she’s Georgia’s first female political prisoner since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Poczobut and Amaghlobeli were named the winners of this year’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought on Wednesday in Strasbourg, France.
“Their courage has made them symbols of the struggle for freedom and democracy,” European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said. “This house stands with them and with all those who continue to demand freedom.”
The E.U. has awarded the Sakharov Prize annually since 1988 to honor individuals or organizations for their human rights work. Several previous winners, including South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, Pakistani education advocate Malala Yousafzai and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, have gone on to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Poczobut and Amaghlobeli, Metsola said, are being held “on trumped-up charges simply for doing their work.”
Poczobut, a member of Belarus’s Polish minority, was reporting on protests over Lukashenko after he claimed victory in a 2020 election widely viewed as fraudulent. When security forces cracked down, Poczobut refused to leave the country and was arrested.
The Polish Journalists Association at the time called Poczobut’s trial and conviction “elements of the regime’s repression against freedom of speech and the Polish minority.”
Amaghlobeli was investigating public spending and abuse of office by the ruling Georgian Dream party. Critics accuse the party of moving the country toward authoritarianism.
After Amaghlobeli’s conviction, the Committee to Protect Journalists warned that the case was “a sign of the declining environment for press freedom in Georgia and a symbol for the fight between truth and control.”
The prize is named for the late Soviet scientist, dissident and Nobel Peace laureate Andrei Sakharov. The shortlist this year included aid workers and journalists in the Palestinian territories and Serbian students involved in nationwide protests.
Each political group in the parliament can nominate a candidate. The U.S. conservative activist Charlie Kirk, shot to death in September during a college appearance in Utah, was put forward by a far-right group but did not receive enough votes to make the shortlist.