Five are the nominees for the Sacharov Award which have been selected by the Foreign Affairs and Development Commissions and by the Human Rights Under-Commission of the European Parliament. The winner will be announced on October 25th while the award will be given in Strasbourg on December 11th. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I is the first nomination "for his work both as the defender of freedom of religion in Turkey and as the promoter of dialogue between the religious communities". The second nomination is that of Zeng Jinyan and Hu Jia, Chinese, as defenders of human rights. Zeng Jinyan is known as a "cyber-dissident who denounces on her blog any breach of human rights or freedoms committed in China; her husband Hu Jia is an activist in the fight against Aids". Joya Malalai, Afghan MEP, was suspended in May 2007 from the National Assembly "after she had denounced the warlords who sit in Parliament". The Sudanese lawyer Mahmoud Osman, the fourth nomination, works with an organisation against torture and "gives free legal assistance to the victims of the civil war". Finally, a nomination has been posthumously given to Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who was killed on October 7th 2006, known for her opposition of the Chechen conflict.
