(Adnkronos) – Italy has congratulated Venezuela’s opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and her exiled ally, former presidential candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, for winning Europe’s top human rights award – the Sakharov prize on Thursday.
“Congratulations to @MariaCorinaYA and @EdmundoGU for winning the 2024 Sakharov Prize,” foreign minister Antonio Tajani Tajani wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
“The highest recognition the European Union gives for efforts to support human rights. More than deserved for the courage shown in giving voice to people oppressed by dictatorship,” the tweet added.
The EU parliament awarded Machado and Urrutia the prize – named after Soviet physicist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov – for their fight for democracy under president Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarian rule.
Maduro was re-elected president in contested July polls, although Venezuela’s opposition believes its candidate Urratia won.
Seventy-five-year-old Urratia went into exile in Spain in September.
There will be an award ceremony in Strasbourg in December and the prize winners receive 50,000 euros.
Previous Sakharov prize winners include Africa’s first black president and anti-apartheid fighter Nelson Mandela and late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in an Artic penal colony in Siberia in February.
