Elon Musk, Mahsa Amini Nominated For EU's Top Rights Prize

 

Mahsa Amini has come to represent the Iranian movement for "Women, Life, and Freedom," which is viewed as the largest threat to the clerical-run administration of the nation.

Belgium's Brussels: Elon Musk, a billionaire, and Mahsa Amini, an Iranian Kurdish lady who passed while in jail a year ago, were two of the nominees announced on Wednesday for the EU's top human rights award.

Amini is the favorite to win this year's Sakharov Prize after receiving the support of all three of the largest political parties in the European Parliament. The award will be given out in December. Elon Musk, the tech tycoon behind X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, as well as electric car manufacturer Tesla and space rocket company SpaceX, was only nominated by the small far-right bloc in the legislature.

  Activists from Afghanistan, Georgia, Nicaragua, Poland, El Salvador, and the United States were nominated by other legislative groups.

Mahsa Amini, 22, passed away on September 16, 2022, while she was being detained by Iran's religious police for allegedly flouting the country's severe rules about women's attire.

  According to rights organizations, Iranian authorities arrested her father and issued a warning to her family not to publicly observe the anniversary of her death out of concern that it might spark new, large-scale street protests.

Security personnel also barred entry to the cemetery housing Amini's grave.

However, Persian-language broadcasts from sources outside of Iran showed Iranians chanting anti-government chants in Tehran and other major Iranian cities.

Rallies were also held in other cities, including as Paris, Sydney, Toronto, and New York.

   Amini has come to represent the "Women, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran, which is viewed as the largest threat to the country's clerical-run government.

The "Women, Life, Freedom" movement is one of the EU legislators' Sakharov Prize nominees. The Identity and Democracy grouping in the parliament, which includes legislators who are nationalistic and on the far-right, proposed Mr. Musk.

Elon Musk has made an effort to position himself as a champion of free speech, although several rights organizations have criticized him for allowing more anti-Semitic and other hate speech on X.

He has also courted controversy by permitting populist leaders favored by the far-right, such as the scandal-plagued and twice-impeached former US president Donald Trump, to return to the X network.

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