European Parliament defies the Dragon by honoring Hu

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The European Parliament has boldly dared to go where the Nobel Peace Prize committee feared to: It has awarded its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to Chinese political activist Hu Jia.

Hu has dedicated his life to monitoring human rights abuses in China and to keeping the international news media informed of them. He spoke to European MPs from house arrest last November about human rights in China ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and as a consequence received a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence for "inciting subversion of state power."

Hu has championed causes such as environmental concerns, asked for further investigations into the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and coordinated the "barefoot lawyers movement." He has been a consistent thorn in the side of official Beijing.

European Parliament President Hans-Gert Pottering said, "By awarding the Sakharov Prize to Hu Jia, the European Parliament firmly and resolutely acknowledges the daily struggle for freedom of all Chinese human rights defenders."

The Chinese government loathes Hu and lobbied hard -- and, as it turned out, successfully -- to prevent him or his fellow Chinese human rights activist Gao Zhisheng from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Both men had been tipped as front-runners, but instead the prize went to former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who everyone believed was a perfectly respectable but also an anemic and safe recipient.

Unlike Hu, Ahtisaari had never risked his life or undergone physical abuse or arrest for his work, and the peace processes he was involved in were all small-scale or peripheral ones, all of which would have been resolved without his work anyway. Ahtisaari is a peace bureaucrat; Hu is a peace hero.

The award of the Sakharov prize to Hu may significantly boost the European Parliament's usually highly unfavorable image in the United States very much for the better. During the years U.S. President George W. Bush was riding high, European leaders and institutions were routinely derided by Bush administration officials and Republican staffers on Capitol Hill for their criticisms of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq or for alleged U.S. human rights abuses in the war on terror around the world. The revelation of widespread torture and humiliation practices at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq a few years ago sparked particular revulsion.

However, now the European Parliament has demonstrated through its award to Hu that its commitment to human rights and democracy as universal values is across the board after all.

The Chinese government knew the award to Hu was a possibility, and European Parliament insiders have already revealed that Beijing diplomats worked hard to get Hu passed over. Other short-list members were Belarus' Alyaksandr Kazulin and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Apollinaire Malu Malu.

The European Parliament's action contrasts sharply with that of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. The Nobel committee never flinched at tweaking the nose of the United States in its recent awards, but it backed off from the prospect of confronting China. The European Parliament looked the Chinese firmly in the eye and did not blink.

The year 2008 was seen as a chance to send a message to China on human rights issues, and both the Nobel committee and European Parliament did exactly that, but they were very different messages.

The formal presentation of the Sakharov Prize is scheduled to be on Dec. 17. Hu also will receive 50,000 euros, less than 5 percent of what Ahtisaari received with his Nobel. And the euro isn't worth as much as it was a month ago. But by dramatically heightening Hu's visibility, the European Parliament may have saved his life, a consideration that did not appear to weigh significantly with the Nobel Peace Prize board.

The European Parliament's decision certainly would have pleased the late Andrei Sakharov, for whom the prize is named. He was the Soviet Union's greatest nuclear physicist, and he dedicated the last decades of his life to exposing human rights abuses and to campaigning for democracy in his country, at enormous personal risk and sacrifice.

Earlier Nobel Peace Prize committees were not as fearful of the Kremlin as the current one appears to be of Beijing: They defied enraged Soviet leaders to award Sakharov the Peace Prize, just as they awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Sakharov's fellow great dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died earlier this year.

The European Parliament has now firmly stepped out to follow that great tradition.