By EFE
Sep 30, 2024, 1:46 PM EDT
Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who this Monday won the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize awarded annually by the Council of Europe, showed her willingness to “continue fighting alongside the Venezuelan people.”
“I have decided to continue fighting alongside the Venezuelan people,” Machado said before the Council of Europe Assembly, in a speech via videoconference.
The opposition member, who is in hiding in her country, added: “I am convinced that it is the right thing to do, that it is my role, and that is why they chose me as their leader for this stage of struggle.”
The award was collected by his daughter, Ana Corina Sosa.
María Corina Machado, founder of the ‘Súmate’ organization and who could not compete in the presidential elections on July 28 due to being disqualified from holding public office by an administrative order, stressed the “importance” of the award, not only for her, “but, above all, for all those who fight together for the cause of freedom in Venezuela.”
And she was “deeply moved, honored and grateful for being the first Latin American to win this distinction.”
The Venezuelan remembered Václav Havel, leader during the Prague Spring in 1968 and first president of the Czechoslovak Republic after the fall of communism in that country, and assured that “in light of his legacy (…) we Venezuelans have identified the root of the problem to defeat the dictatorship.”
“Adhere to our core values and hold the truth as our flag,” he said.
Machado insisted on the “sounding defeat” of Nicolás Maduro in the elections last July and the victory of Edmundo González Urrutia, who “has been forced into exile in Spain” since last September 8.
Since the Council of Europe first awarded the Václav Havel to Belarusian human rights defender Ales Bialiatski in 2013, the organization has awarded activists from Eastern Europe, Turkey and China.
In previous editions, the Turkish journalist Osman Kavala won it; Russian opponent Vladimir Kara-Murza (2022); Uighur minority rights activist Ilham Tohti (2019); or the Yazidi Nadia Mourad (2016).
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