OSMAN KAVALA AWARDED HAVEL HUMAN RIGHTS PRIZE
The Council of Europe has named Turkish arts philanthropist Osman Kavala the winner of the eleventh Václav Havel Prize. The €60,000 ($63,300) award is given in honor of the author and dissident, who in 1989 became president of Czechoslovakia and after its 1993 dissolution led the Czech Republic for a decade. Kavala, a businessman and humanitarian activist who in 2002 established Istanbul-based arts and culture organization Anadolu Kültür, in the spring of 2022 was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole by the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Accused of participating in the 2016 plot to depose Erdoğan and charged with conspiracy, Kavala spent five years in the high-security Silvri Prison despite having not been convicted. The European Court of Human Rights in 2019 demanded his release, citing his imprisonment as in violation of human rights and meant to silence him, thus discouraging the efforts of other humanitarian activists. In 2022, the court’s Grand Chamber began infringement proceedings against the country on the grounds that its actions flouted the European Convention on Human Rights. Human rights watchdog Amnesty International noted that in awarding the prize to Kavala, the Council of Europe had issued a “reminder that Osman Kavala has not been forgotten.”
Ayşe Buğra, Kavala’s wife, accepted the award on his behalf, reading aloud a letter the philanthropist had written in jail, which quoted a missive that Havel wrote to his own wife, Olga, while imprisoned himself in 1980: “The most important thing of all is not to lose hope. This does not mean closing one’s eyes to the horrors of the world. In fact, only those who have not lost faith and hope can see the horrors of the world with genuine clarity.”
