Chinese dissident Hu Jia won the European Parliament’s prestigious Sakharov Prize on Thursday, Greens bloc officials said, amid accusations that Beijing had pressured lawmakers not to give it to him.
”Awarding the Sakharov to Hu Jia is a reflection of this very spirit of this prize, which supports free thought and honours human rights defenders fighting repression,” Greens leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Monica Frassoni said.
”The commitments made by China before the Olympic Games to improve the human rights situation have not been respected,” they added in a statement.
Hu is a campaigner for civil rights, environmental protection and HIV/Aids advocacy in China.
He was arrested last year after giving testimony on human rights in China to the European Parliaments’s human rights subcommittee by phone. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for subversion.
The Sakharov Prize, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, is in its 20th year. Previous winners, chosen for the their human rights activities, will be invited to attend the award presentation on December 17.
It comes with a cash award of €50 000 ($64 150). Ahead of the announcement, senior lawmakers accused Chinese government officials of having pressured members of the European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, not to award the prize to Hu.
”By letter, by email, and they’ve even tried by telephone,” said the head of the parliament’s liberal group, Graham Watson.
A spokesperson for the president of the assembly, Hans-Gert Poettering, said that China’s ambassador had written him a letter ”in which Beijing applies pressure”.
The spokesperson said this sort of pressure was ”more counter-productive”.
”This prize is awarded in Strasbourg, not in Beijing,” Poettering himself said, on the sidelines of the plenary session here.
The letter, from Ambassador Song Zhu, read: ”I have learned with much regret that the European Parliament has made a decision to put him [Hu] on the shortlist.”
”Not recognising China’s progress on human rights and insisting on confrontation will only deepen the misunderstanding between the two sides and is not conducive to the promotion of the cause of world human rights.”
The head of the conservative grouping in Parliament — the assembly’s biggest bloc — Joseph Daul, also received a letter from the ambassador, one of his spokesperson confirmed. – AFP
