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Malahat Nasibova, right, known as the journalist who won’t be silenced – is awarded the Rafto Prize for 2009. She receives the prize for her courageous and unwavering struggle for a free and independent press.

On 28 July, the 1994 Rafto Prize Laureate and an internationally renowned Kurdish politician and spokesperson, was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. The court claimed that Zana, when speaking at a conference in London last year, stated that the PKK and its jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan are “as important for the Kurdish people as the brain and the soul are for a human being.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, right, said Tuesday she was alarmed by the large number of casualties during Sunday’s rioting in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, and continuing reports of high tension and unrest, and called for restraint by all actors.

Sahrawi refugees started arriving in Algeria in the mid-seventies. UNHCR has been providing assistance to this group since the influx into the Tindouf area in 1975-76 while WFP has been providing food assistance since 1986. The refugees have been living in four desolate camps in south-west Algeria since the mid-seventies, when a dispute arose between Morocco and the Frente Polisario over the status of Western Sahara.

On 23 February, on the way out of her family’s house in al Quds street in El Aaiun, a 16 year old pupil was stopped by the police, undressed and raped during interrogation. As the interrogation ended, she was threatened that she would be killed if she publicized the story. “This is terrible. I know her well”, said the winner of the Student Peace Prize 2009, Rabab Amidane.

Today, the Ghulja massacre is being marked worldwide. The Rafto Foundation pays its respect to the hundreds of Uyghurs who were killed or imprisoned after participating in a peaceful demonstration in Ghulja in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the People´s Republic of China in 1997.

Rabab Amidane, right, is awarded the Norwegian Student’s Peace Prize for her work for human rights, students’ rights and peace in Western Sahara. Amidane is contributing to inform the world about the discrimination and the violence that the Sahrawis are exposed to by the Moroccan government. Even though Amidane uses peaceful means in her fight for human rights, she has been exposed to torture and arrested by the Moroccan police several times.

Rafto Laureate Leyla Zana attended the 5th international conferance on EU, Republic of Turkey and the Kurds in Brussels on 28 January. Zana, together with several speakers, expressed their request for real changes in the Republic of Turkey.

The office of the Iranian human rights lawyer, Shirin Ebadi, was closed down on December 21 last year and her secretary was arrested in January 2009. Despite international recognition Shirin Ebadi has been harassed by Iranian authorities for years.