The Vaclav Havel 2019 Human Rights Prize was awarded on Monday 30 September to two winners: Ilham Tohti, a Uighur intellectual sentenced in 2014 by the Chinese authorities to life imprisonment for separatism, and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, an association working for reconciliation in the Balkans.
The shortlisting of Ilham Tohti last August angered Beijing, which accused the Council of Europe of supporting “extremist terrorism”. Already the recipient of two human rights awards...