Self-exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed received the 2017 Courage Award, at the 9th annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy on Tuesday.
Former High Commissioner of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), veteran Swedish-Finnish politician Astrid Thors presented Nasheed with the award at the Summit held at Geneva, Switzerland on Tuesday, on behalf of the 25 NGOs that partnered up to hold the Summit.
The award reads "to President Mohamed Nasheed, for inspiring the world with your extraordinary courage in the defense of liberty and universal human rights," read out Thors, while presenting the award.
The annual Summit- held on the eve of the United Nations Human Rights Council's main session- brings together hundreds of human rights victims, activists, diplomats, journalists and student leaders who seek to “shine a spotlight on urgent human rights situations that require global attention.”
Documentary-makers, journalists, human rights activists, and political prisoners spoke at this year’s summit; including Zhanna Nemstova, daughter of the assassinated Russian stateman and liberal politician who strongly criticized the Putin administration,
In 2014, the award was given to Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, often called the ‘barefoot lawyer’, who was imprisoned for a lawsuit against authorities, and in 2015 to Raif Badawi. Velezuelan opposition leaders, Antonio Ledezma & Leopoldo Lopez received the award in 2016.
The former President- who has been arrested and imprisoned a number of times, even being named Amnesty International's prisoner of conscience- was sentenced to 13 years in jail in March 2015, following a trial which lasted just 19 days. The international community has called for his immediate release, with the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) ruling that his detention "is arbitrary".
Nasheed, speaking after receiving the rights award, thanked his legal team- both local and international- his family, Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) and its members and supporters "for consistently agitating" the authorities till he was able to travel to the United Kingdom "on the pretext of medicine."
"They had the streets of Male’ filled with people until under a pretext of medicine that I was able to travel to England," said Nasheed, adding that he does have "a bad back."
While Maldivian authorities have revoked Nasheed's passport, Britain has granted him political asylum. He was recently in Sri Lanka for about two weeks, where he called on President Maithripala Sirisena and vice president Ranil Wickremesinghe.
