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From 2013 to 2016 the European Parliament published books of Sakharov Prize laureates. In 2015 and 2016 these books featured illustrations by Ali Ferzat, a Syrian cartoonist and one of the 2011 Sakharov Prize laureates.
In 2018, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament and Magnum Photos published "They defend our freedoms", an immersive journey into the daily lives of four Sakharov fellows fighting for human rights in Cambodia, Tunisia, Ethiopia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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He founded and ran the Saudi Liberals, and later the Free Saudi Liberals network, online discussion forums on religion and politics in his conservative country. The forums had a thousand registered users when he was detained for a day's questioning in 2008 on suspicion of apostasy, a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. Subsequently, he was banned indefinitely from leaving Saudi Arabia, his bank accounts were frozen, and his wife's family tried to force a divorce. A fatwa was put on his head by a hard-line imam.
Badawi valiantly continued to air his moderate liberal views. He wrote in defence of the right to freedom of thought and expression and called for a society open to the views of others. He also said that the mere expression of an opinion could bring down a fatwa on the head of a free thinker in an Arab society straining under the theocratic yoke. This, he feared, would cause the brightest minds to flee.
Despite his isolation from the outside world, Badawi has become a global symbol and a reminder of the repressive nature of the Saudi regime, just as its leaders are trying to strengthen their ties with Europe and the United States. In 2015 and 2016, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Badawi's wife Ensaf Haidar and their three children live in Canada. They fled Saudi Arabia in 2013 following anonymous death threats. She represented her husband at the award ceremony in Strasbourg and at the conference held to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Sakharov Prize. On behalf of her husband, she founded the Raif Badawi Foundation, an open platform for international dialogue and a resource centre for academic research on legal and social issues concerning the Arab world.
Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics by 
The Islamic Civil Rights Movement in Saudi Arabia: The Concept of Peaceful Jihad by Born in Bukavu in 1955, he studied medicine and founded the gynaecology service at Lemera hospital in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was destroyed when war broke out in 1996. Mukwege fled back to Bukavu and started a hospital from tents, building a new maternity ward and operating theatre, but all of this was destroyed in the Second Congo War of 1998. Undeterred, Mukwege rebuilt his hospital in Panzi, working long hours and training staff to treat women victimised by the combatants who had 'declared women their common enemy'. He has treated over tens of thousands of women since the hospital reopened in 1999 and the very first rape victim that he accepted appeared with bullet wounds in her genitals and thighs. Within weeks, dozens of women had reported to the hospital with stories of rape and torture.
Mukwege is an internationally recognised expert in repairing the pathological and psychosocial damage caused by sexual violence. The hospital he runs in Panzi offers psychological and physical care, and provides support to women so that they can develop new skills to earn a living, as many have been rejected by their communities. Girls are also given support to go back to school, and legal aid is offered to those seeking legal redress.
Mukwege has been a tireless campaigner for victimised women ever since he recognised a young woman on his operating table as a girl at whose birth he had assisted at Panzi hospital. For Mukwege, this was a pivotal moment that galvanised him to go beyond healing and start speaking out at home and abroad for an end to the violence raging over the Democratic Republic of the Congo's natural resources. He became a victim himself in 2012, when armed men stormed his home and held his daughters at gunpoint. His bodyguard and friend was killed, but he escaped, fleeing with his family to Sweden and then Belgium. He returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2013 when a group of women, who were living on less than a dollar a day, got together to buy his ticket home.
Mukwege now lives at Panzi hospital despite continuous threats to his life. He has also launched the Dr. Denis Mukwege Foundation, which provides support to a global network of survivors of sexual violence. He was deeply involved in Parliament's legislative process that led to the 2017 EU regulation on conflict minerals, which aims to prevent certain conflict minerals and metals from being exported to Europe.
Sexual Violence Crimes and Gendered Power Relations: Bringing justice to women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by In 2013 Malala became the youngest ever laureate of the Sakharov Prize, dedicating it to the 'unsung heroes of Pakistan', in a defence of every child's right to an education.
'Many children have no food to eat, no water to drink and children are starving for education. It is alarming that 57 million children are deprived of education [...] this must shake our conscience', Malala told the representatives of 28 nations before a packed European Parliament and - quite exceptionally - all living laureates of the Sakharov Prize gathered for its 25th anniversary conference. 'One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world'.
Malala's fight for education began aged 11 when she wrote an anonymous online diary about a schoolgirl's life under the Taliban in Pakistan's Swat Valley. In 2009 the Taliban decreed that all girls' schools should close while the Pakistani army fought them for control. Malala and her family were forced to flee their besieged hometown and her school was left in ruins. Returning home after the security situation had improved, Malala and her father Ziauddin, who himself ran a girls' school, continued to advocate girls' education in spite of threats. Malala used a donation to buy the very school bus on which she and two other girls were shot and injured in 2012, in an attack for which the Taliban claimed responsibility.
Malala is now a committed campaigner for girls' education, a co-founder of the Malala Fund and a member of the Youth Education Crisis Committee, which was set up by the UN Special Envoy for Global Education, Gordon Brown, who has estimated that at current rates, it will be 2086 before all girls are in school, and not 2015, as promised in the Millennium Development Goals. 'In Islam girls are allowed to get education. It's the duty and responsibility of every person, whether a boy or a girl, to get education and knowledge,' Malala affirms.
Terrorism in Pakistan by Access to Education and Gender Equality by Chhabi Kumar and Varun Pandey in:
Gender Equality by Malala Yousafzai (1997–): A Portrait in Courage and Conviction by Gamze Erdem Türkelli in:
The Faces of Human Rights by 
Nasrin Sotoudeh and Jafar Panahi - 2012, IranBy awarding the Sakharov Prize to two Iranian activists, lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and film director Jafar Panahi, the European Parliament acknowledges their plight and their outstanding efforts in their incessant struggle for human dignity, fundamental freedoms and political change in Iran, said President Martin Schulz at the Sakharov Prize award ceremony in Strasbourg. The laureates were not able to attend the ceremony in person because they are not allowed to leave Iran.
Before she herself was arrested in 2010, Nasrin Sotoudeh was among the few who bravely undertook the legal defence of dissenters arrested in the 2009 mass protests against an election they believed fraudulent. When she was awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2012, Sotoudeh was serving a six-year jail sentence on charges of endangering Iran's national security, and was undertaking a seven-week hunger strike in solitary confinement in Iran's notorious Evin prison in protest against the judicial pressure faced by her husband and daughter.
Despite her frail state, she found the strength to write a memorable message to the European Parliament, read on her behalf at the award ceremony by her friend, colleague and client, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi: 'The story of human rights, and the mechanisms for guaranteeing them, has come a long way, yet its realisation still largely depends on the intentions of governments, the biggest violators of human rights'. To human rights defenders and political prisoners, Sotoudeh said, 'Just like you, I also know that democracy has a long and difficult road ahead'.
She was unexpectedly released in September 2013 for reasons the Iranian authorities never divulged, but her sentence was not lifted, and she is still banned from leaving Iran and thus unable to receive her Sakharov Prize. Nevertheless, in Tehran in December 2013, she managed to meet the first European Parliament delegation to visit Iran in six years. The meeting - where she focused on the situation of political prisoners and denounced the lack of transparency of the trials held at revolutionary rather than criminal courts - caused a furore among Iranian hardliners, who accused her and Jafar Panahi of being seditionists. On her release from prison, Sotoudeh returned to her activism, defending women victims of acid attacks, religious minorities and human rights campaigns, including the campaign for an end to the death penalty. She has been temporarily detained by the Iranian authorities on a number of occasions.
An outspoken supporter of the Iranian opposition and a critic of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he was sentenced to six years in jail for 'propaganda against the Islamic Republic', but his sentence is still awaiting execution of verdict. He is not currently in jail, but could be imprisoned at any time. He was arrested in 2010 while making a clandestine film about the failed 2009 Green Movement uprising. Though released after three months following international protests and a hunger strike, he was later sentenced to jail and banned from making films, travelling and talking to the media.
The Final Cut: Authority and Democracy in Contemporary Iran: From National Borders to the Idea of Islamic Empire by Seyed Mohammad Lolaki in:
Diverging Approaches of Political Islamic Thought in Iran since The 1960s by Character Education and Cultural Rights: The Case of Minorities in Iran by Tahirih T. Danesh in:
The Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law by 
Iran: U. S. Relations, Foreign Policies and Sanctions by 
Understanding Revolutions: opening acts in Tunisia by 
After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition by The drop that made the cup overflow: the protest self-burning of Mohamed Bouazizi (Tunisia, 2010) in:
A Cruel Theatre of Self-Immolations: Contemporary Suicide Protests by Fire and Their Resonances in Culture by His 7-month hunger strike in 2006 drew worldwide attention to internet censorship in Cuba and caused him severe health problems.
Undeterred, in February 2010, after the controversial death of prisoner Orlando Zapata, Fariñas began a hunger and thirst strike that lasted 134 days, calling for the liberation of political prisoners who had become ill after many years of imprisonment. He ended his strike only after the Cuban government announced it was in the process of freeing 52 political prisoners. Fariñas was not allowed to leave Cuba for the 2010 Sakharov Prize award ceremony at the European Parliament. He finally addressed Parliament at the 2013 Sakharov Prize award ceremony, after the Cuban government eased travel restrictions on Cubans and the Damas de Blanco had re‑entered Cuba after visiting Parliament.
'Today, I am here not because the situation has essentially changed, but because of the realities of the modern world, and above all, because of the growing civic defiance of Cubans, which has forced the regime to - like the legendary prince Don Fabrizio from Il Gattopardo said - "change something so that nothing changes"', Fariñas stated in his acceptance speech.
Human Rights Digital Society and the Law by Reflections on access to the Internet in Cuba as a human right by Raudiel F. Peña Barrios in:
Research Handbook on Human Rights and Digital Technology by More Pluralism, or Continued Authoritarianism? by Vegard Bye in:
Cuba, from Fidel to Raúl and Beyond by If you are unable to access the book you need, please contact us and we will get it for you as soon as possible.
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Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was flogged and jailed for discussing liberal political ideas and religious topics online.
Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege has devoted his life to the rehabilitation of tens of thousands of victims of rape and brutal sexual violence and many more who live under its threat.
Only 11 when she started her fight for the right of girls to education and against Taliban extremism in Pakistan, Malala Yousafzai fought on even after an attempt on her life in 2012.
Doctor of psychology, journalist and political dissident Guillermo Fariñas went on a number of hunger strikes aimed at bringing about peaceful political change and freedom of expression in Cuba.