Andrei Sakharov

...is the inspiration for the Sakharov Prize awarded by the European Parliament each year to a human rights activist. In my "Human Rights: Concepts and Institutions" class, one of the group activities was for each group to argue in favor of one of four nominees. My group was assigned Leyla Yunus of Azerbaijan.

I was paired with Dinara from Kazakhstan and Yanran from China. Our presentation kicked some major butt, thanks to Dinara, who was a fount of ideas. She played a BBC reporter presenting a profile of Leyla (complete with slides, photos, maps). Yanran played Leyla's daughter and I played two characters: a woman evicted from her flat by the Azerbaijani government and a Queen's University professor discussing Leyla's (excellent) chances of winning. I also wrote the 1,300 word essay about Leyla's life (Leyla and her husband are in jail in a class case of Soviet era political persecution).

The class voted at the end and the winner was the Congolese physician Denis Mkwege, who had won the prize in real life. So it was a bit of an unfair set up (Mkwege returned to the Congo after an assassination attempt to continue operating on women who have been raped and genitally mutilated).

I really enjoyed working with Dinara (who works for a nonprofit focused on prison reform) and Yanran (who is studying criminal justice and doesn't know what she wants to do after college). Here is a photo of us taken after the vote.

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