Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny has won the Sakharov Prize, a prestigious honor awarded by the European Parliament for human rights defenders. For more than a decade, Navalny has targeted Russia’s political elite with anti-corruption investigations, led political protests, and run for office. Since March, he has been jailed at a notorious prison in the Russian city of Pokrov. He was detained following his return to Moscow in January after recovering in Berlin from what several Western laboratories determined was poisoning with a military-grade nerve agent. A report by Navalny and other investigators presented strong evidence that the Russian Federal Security Service carried out the poisoning, and Navalny accuses President Vladimir Putin of ordering it in an attempt to kill him. Earlier this month, Aleksei Navalny was designated a “terrorist” by a Russian prison commission.
