Badawi’s Absence Is a Presence at Prize Ceremony

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Raif is not a criminal. He is a writer and a free thinker: that is all. Raif Badawi’s crime is being a free voice in a country which does not accept anything other than a single opinion and a single thought.”—Ensaf Haidar

Ensaf Haidar, the wife of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, accepted the 2015 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, this morning. Badawi’s absence was itself a presence at the ceremony. He remains in Dhaban Central Prison, where he was moved late last week, as I reported here at the time.

Badawi is the young Saudi writer who was found guilty of “insulting Islam” in his essays on his website and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1000 lashes with a cane. On January 9, 2015, the first set of 50 blows was delivered in a public whipping. He has not been caned since. The international movement on his behalf, sparked by a young wife’s determination to make the world know her imprisoned husband’s name, led Amnesty International to declare months ago that it has received more signatures for petitions demanding his release than any other in its long and remarkable history. As far as I am concerned, Ensaf Haidar should be on every publication’s end-of-year list of Most Heroic People of 2015.

The European Parliament’s press release about the ceremony noted that Badawi is not the first honoree who was unable to accept the award in person; Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist in Myanmar, won the citation in 1990 when she was under house arrest and forbidden from leaving her country. In 2013, she was able to receive the prize in person. One hopes that Raif Badawi also is able to receive the prize in person someday and that a generation will not pass until that day. But one knows that the ongoing fight for justice and freedom of thought is, at its heart, supremely patient.
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For Your Eyes …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I am a very private person, plus I am pretty committed to being co-dependent with the planet, so I probably waste more psychic energy and time trying to give other people their privacy than I spend on maintaining my own. Especially in those moments when it seems that people around me are oblivious to their horrible and immediate need to simply keep things to themselves. Or to warn me of imminent over-sharing.

I could blame cell phones, blame Facebook and Instagram, think some thoughts about the effect of self-help groups and therapy on the culture at large, but after thinking all those deep thoughts, I do not care about your details, unless you are my dearest, most intimate friend(s). No. Not even then. Even then, there are things I do not really need to know. The details.
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A Thank You from Movements.org

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The website Movements.org was launched last year as a tool to “crowdsource human rights.” It is a great idea. In the last five years or so, many crowdsourcing sites have been started and most of them are geared toward raising money for specific projects. Movements does not raise funds, but awareness.

If you know about a human rights violation and you think the world needs to know about it, you post a statement about it there in your language. Activists read about it and take it from there. On the other side, if you are an activist looking for a story that has not received much attention yet, several dozen new ones are posted each day. If you are someone who cares about human rights as an issue, as a philosophical idea, but you do not know where to begin, who to contact, or what to say, Movements.org is a fine place to start. In certain ways, it puts the human back into the phrase “human rights,” because the cases featured on the site are stories of individuals, not the usual eye-tiring and heart-saddening litany of overwhelming numbers.

Readers of this website know that I have recently featured the story of a photographer named Shawkan, who has been in prison in Egypt for two and a half years now. Today, Movements.org cited TheGadAboutTown.com in a section of the website called “Success Stories.”
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