Persecuted trio up for prize

– A Turkish human rights lawyer, an Afro-Colombian activist and a Sudanese refugee were nominated yesterday for one of the world’s most prestigious human rights prizes.

The annual Martin Ennals Award – sometimes referred to as “the Nobel prize for human rights” due to its global scope – recognises the work of human rights defenders at risk of persecution.

Among the finalists for the prize, to be awarded in February next year, is lawyer and human rights activist Eren Keskin, 59, who has campaigned for more than three decades against sexual violence and torture in Turkey.

Organisers of the award say her work has led to physical attacks, including two assaults and the threat of rape.

An editor-in-chief for a newspaper shut down by the Turkish authorities, Keskin was convicted in March of “insulting” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and is appealing a 12½-year jail sentence.

Another finalist is Marino Cordoba Berrio, 54, a member of the Afro-Colombian ethnic group who has spent decades campaigning against the illegal logging and mining of his community’s land in the Pacific region.

Forced to seek asylum in the US in 2002, he returned a decade later to Colombia. Award organisers say he has regularly received death threats and is under constant armed guard.

This year’s third nominee is Abdul Aziz Muhamat, a 26-yearold Sudanese refugee who has been held on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island for five years.

He is one of hundreds of asylum seekers who Australia sends to remote Pacific facilities such as on Nauru and Manus Island, and has documented allegations of abuse and cruelty through a podcast and media interviews.

“He has paid a price for this as he is seen as a ‘ring leader’ by both the PNG and Australian authorities,” organisers of the Martin Ennals Award said.

“My work to expose this cruel system helps preserve my self-respect and inherent human dignity,” Muhamat said in a statement.

The Geneva-based Martin Ennals Foundation is named after the first secretary-general of Amnesty International, who died in 1991. The prize is judged by 10 leading rights groups. –

Geneva

Herat

Hunched and shrivelled, Afghan glass-blower Ghulam Sakhi deftly blows and twirls molten glass into delicate blue and green goblets and vases – a craft passed down for generations but now at risk of dying out.

Sakhi is one of the last makers of Herati glassware in the eponymous western city where the once-thriving industry has been shattered by decades of war, poverty, and cheap imports.

The brick and corrugated iron workshop where Sakhi toils only operates a few days a month owing to the lack of demand for the