Strasbourg, 15/12/2005 (Agence Europe) - During a solemn session in Strasbourg on 14 December, the European Parliament awarded the Sakharov Prize 2005 to three winners: the Women in White (Damas de Blanco) from Cuba; the Nigerian lawyer, Hauwa Ibrahim; and the international organisation, “Reporters without Borders”. Freedom of expression is the right that separates freedom from tyranny, President Borrell recalled, citing Voltaire and Brecht and noting that the European Parliament “has today served as an echo chamber for human rights on a global scale”.
The ceremony was unfortunately marked by the absence of the Women in White to whom the Cuban government had refused authorisation to leave Cuba, an attitude that President Borrell “finds lamentable and deplorable and which he rejects”. Blanca Reyes, the former Woman in White who is today in exile, came to represent the other Women in White - mothers, wives or sisters who demonstrate in La Havana peacefully every Sunday to denounce the arrest of 75 dissidents in 2004. Receiving this award is an incentive for the women to continue to combat the Cuban government which has “systematically violated human rights”, Ms Reyes said. Speaking on behalf of the Damas de Blanco, she declined President Borrell's invitation to lunch, explaining: “this empty chair policy must be the symbol of our protest against the Cuban dictatorship and its denunciation before the world as a whole”.
“The award is a gift, it means giving a voice to those who do not have one”, was the thankful comment by Hauwa Ibrahim, who is a lawyer in a country which has not been under military dictatorship since 1999 although democratic elections coincided with the introduction of penal aspects of the Chaira, which condemns women accused of adultery to death by stoning. “Our strategy is to seek to understand how the Charia, the Mollahs and the Nigerian society work, but also to come to grips with the fundamentalists”, she said after a meeting, saying that the Mollahs have pledged not to oppose her in public although they do not support her. “That is all we needed for our security”, she added. The Sakharov Prize is, for some prizewinners, a sort of life insurance that is certainly worth more than the amount they receive, EUR 50,000, Josep Borrell commented. Hauwa Ibrahim hopes to donate all this money to education in her country, the only way to combat ignorance and poverty. “I shall return with the feeling of a mission to be accomplished, the future of those who do not have power”, and also with more confidence for reforming the legal system in Niger, according to a bottom-up method, in line with the cultural values of our society, she said.
Reporters without Borders will pay the Sakharov Prize to Cuba, their way of protesting against the European Parliament's “capacity to be indignant over variable geometry”, by seeking excuses when the Cuba dictatorship is denounced, exclaimed Robert Ménard of the Reporters without Borders team. The Parliament had rallied in great support for the release of French journalist Florence Aubenas , who had been taken hostage
in Iraq, but one should not forget that “there are other Florence Aubenas, who do not belong to large western countries with powerful media. One cannot be credible if we do not rally when it is for the others rather than for our own”. The Parliament cannot continue to have a double standard approach but must “defend everyone's freedom of expression and not just the ideas of those who resemble us”, Mr Ménard insisted, also calling on the Parliament to demand respect of the clauses of the association agreement with Tunis concerning human rights, if freedom of expression is not guaranteed in this country. As “the good thing about human rights is that it works, you can change people's lives from one day to the next”, he concluded.