Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad awarded Václav Havel Prize
The fourth Václav Havel Human Rights Prize – which honours outstanding civil society action in defence of human rights – has been awarded to Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad. The €60 000 prize was presented at a special ceremony today at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg, on the opening day of the autumn plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
As the press statement released by the organization reports, at the age of 21 (in 2014), Nadia Murad was kidnapped by ISIS in northern Iraq together with thousands of other women and children. She was kept in slavery and abused for three months until she managed to escape and flee to Germany. Since then, she has become a human rights activist, bringing the plight of the Yazidi community, in particular the forced sexual enslavement and human trafficking of women and children captured by ISIS, to the forefront of international attention.
The Václav Havel Human Rights Prize is awarded each year by the Parliamentary Assembly, in partnership with the Václav Havel Library and the Charta 77 Foundation, to reward outstanding civil society action in defence of human rights in Europe and beyond. Nominations of any individual, non-governmental organisation or institution working to defend human rights are taken into consideration. The Prize consists of a sum of € 60 000, a trophy and a diploma.
To remind, earlier Nadia Murad attended the Second Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide in Yerevan. Nadia Murad was among more than 5,000 Yazidi women taken captive when ISIS swept through the group’s territories in northern Iraq. She shared with Panorama.am the hardships suffered while leaving Mosul, a major concentration point of Daesh terrorists.
“I was in Mosul and was looking for opportunities to leave the town. I knew there were no chances to survive. The whole city was controlled by the terrorists. I found a house where I took Islamic clothes, disguised my face and escaped. I got assistance from some people and had the luck to cross the border. Later I was transferred to a Yezidi refugee cam and joined my brother, with a follow-up trip to Germany,” Murad said.
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