María Corina Machado wins the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize from the Council of Europe

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won this Monday, September 30, the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize awarded each year by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

It was her daughter Ana Corina Sosa who collected the award on behalf of her mother, which is in hiding due to threats from the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro.

“The prize is awarded to María Corina Machado of Venezuela,” announced Theodoros Rousopoulos, president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, at the beginning of its plenary session in Strasbourg, in northeastern France, after describing her as a “defender” of the democracy.

“I deeply regret that I cannot travel,” Rousopoulos told María Corina Machado, who connected by videoconference.

The 56-year-old opposition figure played a key role in Venezuela’s presidential election in July. Although the authorities proclaimed President Nicolás Maduro the winner, the opposition claims that its candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won.

Since then, the situation of the opposition is precarious. Machado is in hiding, in the midst of a wave of arrests of members of his close circle, and González Urrutia went into exile to Spain on September 8.

“It is an enormous change and a great personal challenge,” Machado confessed in a recent interview with AFP, referring to the secrecy that he breaks on rare occasions to participate in demonstrations in Venezuela.

“I am where I feel most useful for the struggle, in Venezuela (…), accompanying the Venezuelans as a struggle that continueswhich is much bigger than any of us,” he stressed to questions about whether exile was considered.

It is the first time that the Council of Europe awards the Václav Havel to someone from Latin Americasince the organization first presented the award in 2013 to Belarusian human rights defender Ales Bialiatski.

The other two nominees of this edition were Akif Gurbanov, political activist from Azerbaijan, co-founder of the Institute of Democratic Initiative (IDI) and the Third Republic Platform, arrested in March of this year during a demonstration; and Babutsa Pataraia, a Georgian lawyer who has been fighting against feminicide for more than a decade and director of the NGO Sapari.

In 2023 it was the Turkish journalist, activist and businessman, Osman Kavala, imprisoned since 2017, who won the award, worth 60,000 euros.

In previous editions, it was won by the Russian opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza (2022), the activist for the rights of the Uyghur minority Ilham Tohti (2019) or the Yazidi Nadia Mourad (2016).

The Council of Europe, an organization that is not part of the European Union, was founded in 1949 to promote the integration of the continent, the rule of law and human rights, after the Second World War.