A shortlist of five candidates for the Sakharov Prize has been drawn up by the foreign affairs and development committees and human rights sub-committee of the European Parliament. The name of the winner will be announced on 25 October, and the prize-giving ceremony will take place in Strasbourg on 11 December. The first of the nominees is Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I “for his work both as defender of freedom of religion in Turkey and as promoter of dialogue between religious communities”. The second joint candidates are the Chinese Zeng Jinyan and Hu Jia, for their work as defenders of human rights: Zeng Jinyan has been called a “cyber-dissident who denounces on his blog the human rights abuses and civil liberties violations perpetrated in China”. The third nominee is Joya Malalai, Afghan MP, who was suspended as a member of the National Assembly in May 2007 “after having denounced the warlords who sit in Parliament”. The Sudanese lawyer Salih Mahmoud Osman, the fourth nominee, “provides his legal aid free of charge to the victims of the civil war”. The fifth and last nomination for the award is a posthumous one: Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist murdered on 7 October 2006, known for her opposition to the war in Chechnya.
