Awards draw ridicule as well as praise

Date: 30/10/03

THE choice of this year's Sakharov Prize - United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and all UN staff - has been branded “ridiculous”.

Leaders of political groups in the European Parliament said the award was in memory of the UN representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed alongside other staff by a bomb attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad on 19 August.

But Daniel Cohn-Bendit, joint leader of the Greens/European Free Alliance group, criticized the decision as an “aberration”.

He said: “We admire the work of the UN but this prize is meant to honour individuals for their fight for freedom of expression, human rights and democracy. This tradition has been broken.”

The prize, worth €50,000, will be handed to Annan when he addresses Parliament on 29 January. It was first awarded in 1988 and is named after the late Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. Past winners include Nelson Mandela.

EUROPEAN Commission Vice-President Neil Kinnock has paid tribute to the “dedication and boldness”.of journalists operating in repressed and corrupt regimes.

Kinnock was speaking as he presented the Natali Prize for Journalism at the Résidence Palace, Brussels, on 24 October.

The award is named after the late Italian resistance fighter Lorenzo Natali, a former Commission vice-president.

This year's winners are: Kenyan Ken Opala for articles on the death penalty; Walid Batrawi for encouraging greater professionalism in the Palestinian media; Massoud Ansari for exposing human rights abuses in the Afghan repatriation scheme in Pakistan; Sofia Branco for an investigation into female circumcision, and; Jose Hoyos Estrada for articles on self-help initiatives in Columbia.

Kofi Annan and all UN staff were awarded the 2003 Sakharov Prize. Critics feel that the choice of recipient has veered away from the original intention of the prize which was to honour individuals for their fight for freedom of expression, human rights and democracy.