UN: Secretary General Kofi Annan and the staff of the United Nations won the European Parliament's top human rights award yesterday in memory of UN staff killed in Iraq and elsewhere working for world peace.
Parliament leaders awarded the 2003 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought with a special citation for the UN special envoy in Iraq, Mr Sergio Vieira de Mello, and other officials who were killed in a devastating truck bomb attack in Baghdad in August. Mr Annan and the United Nations won the 2001 Nobel peace prize.
The European Parliament's choice was seen partly as a political statement of support for the international body after a year in which a US-led coalition waged war on Iraq without explicit UN authority. Mr De Mello, a 55-year-old Brazilian, had served over 30 years with the UN and was seen as a possible future secretary-general.
Heads of the parliament's political groups made the choice at a meeting in Strasbourg. Also short-listed were dissident Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji, UN arms inspectors led by Dr Hans Blix, who headed the hunt for Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction, as well as the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog Dr Mohamed ElBaradei.
The Sakharov Prize, first awarded in 1988 in honour of the late Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, is conferred upon individuals or organisations who have made a decisive contribution to the fight for human rights.