Jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi wins PEN Pinter prize
A group of people including members of Amnesty International and the Norwegian Humanist Associationn demonstrate against the flogging of Raif Badawi outside the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Oslo, Norway. (Dan-Raoul Miranda)
Saudi blogger Raif Badawi who was jailed, fined and publicly lashed after being convicted of charges including “violating Islamic values and propagating liberal thought” has been named co-winner of the 2015 PEN Pinter prize.
Badawi was convicted of insulting Islam in 2012, and fined £175,000, and is currently serving a 10-year sentence in Saudi Arabia and is due to receive 1,000 lashes won the PEN Pinter prize that celebrates free speech.
Accepting the award for Badawi, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said the British government should “show moral leadership” and seek his release and expressed his honor to accept the award in place of Badawi.
While Badawi’s wife Ensaf Haidar, who has campaigned for his release, said “Raif is just a peace-loving intellectual who was not content to be part of the flock or to follow men of religion who are out of touch with the real world and who rule through laws that are unjust and despotic. He was brave enough to speak out and say no to their brutality and oppression, and their only response was to punish his frail body with the whips of their ignorance.”
“The 50 lashes he received have been enough to ignite massive protests that have still not subsided. From Korea to Australia and the farthest reaches of Canada, people of all kinds have cried: ‘I am Raif.’”
Badawi shares the prize with the British poet and journalist James Fenton, who won the prize earlier this year and was asked to choose an international writer from a list PEN offered and he chose Badawi saying, “What moved me was the contrast between the simplicity of Badawi’s liberal aims – their modesty, almost – and the ferocity of the punishments they have brought down on him.
“Imprisonment, astonishing fines, corporal punishment designed to break either the spirit or the body first and to act as a chill warning to others. It is a world of inconceivable cruelty, but intimately linked to ours by business, strategic interests, military and diplomatic ties. For our part then, protest has a purpose and – who knows? – perhaps even a chance of some sort of success.”
The award was established in 2009 in memory of playwright and Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. It is awarded annually to one British writer and one international writer, who show a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.
Egypt, Managing Editor of the AsiaN's Middle East Bureau, Graduate Student of Mass Communication and Journalism at Ahram Canadian University 
Trump, Kim, and the Three P’s of Summit Diplomacy: 
The Guardian points out that the British government has declined to “comment” on the Saudi legal process. In this regard it is perhaps worth observing that PEN itself has had not a word to say about the criminalizing of an entire Internet campaign in New York on the grounds that it was “annoying.”
Nor has PEN taken a position on the criminalizing, in the same case in New York, of inappropriate email parodies in which a distinguished academic department chairman was portrayed as justifying an act of alleged plagiarism on the absurd grounds that “if I had given credit to this man, I would have been banned from participating in conferences around the world.”
Following the dissenting opinion of the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals on First Amendment grounds, the troubling issues raised by that prosecution are now being litigated in federal court in Manhattan. See the documentation of America’s leading criminal satire case at:
http://raphaelgolbtrial.wordpress.com/
Thus, just as in the case of Charlie Hebdo, PEN fights for a popular cause (and one that in itself is quite worthy), while apparently choosing to discreetly ignore assaults on free speech that it would be impolitic to address.