Pussy Riot nominated for EU prize

Three jailed members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot have been short-listed by the European Parliament for this year's Sakharov Prize.  

The prize is named after the Soviet-era dissident Andrei Sakharov and has been awarded since 1988 to defenders of freedom of thought.  

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina were given two-year jail sentences in mid-August for “premeditated hooliganism performed by an organised group of people motivated by religious hatred or hostility” after staging a song critical of the Russian government in St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow.  

In its nomination of the three women, the European Parliament's foreign-affairs committee said that the group had “done even more than murders of journalists and repressive new laws to focus the world's attention on the unscrupulous restriction of civil rights and the absence of the rule of law in Russia”.  

The other European nominee is Ales Bialiatski, the vice-president of the International Federation for Human Rights, who was sentenced to four and a half years in jail in Belarus in November 2011.  

The last nomination is for two Iranians, Nasrin Sotoudeh, a jailed human-rights lawyer, and Jafar Panahi, a film director.    

The winner will be chosen by the presidents of the various political groupings in the European Parliament and will be named on 26 October. 

A longer list, announced on 25 September, included a nomination for a civil-society leader in Pakistan, Joseph Francis, who founded the Centre for Legal Aid, Assistance and Settlement, and nominations for members of the Rwandan opposition.  

Previous winners of the prize, which comes with €50,000 in cash, include Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Myanmar's opposition, as well as several from two of the countries represented on this year's shortlist. Alyaksandr Milinkevich, a leader of Belarus's opposition, won in 2006 and the Belarusian Federation of Journalists in 2004. The Russian civil-rights and historical society Memorial won the 2009 prize.