Osman Kavala, the imprisoned midwife in Turkey and Ankara’s black sheep, was today awarded the Council of Europe’s Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, risking the wrath of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The award, which comes with a financial prize of €60,000, has been awarded annually since 2013 to a civil society figure for her “outstanding actions in favor of human rights in Europe and beyond”.

The 66-year-old businessman, with a lot of charity work, was arrested in October 2017 and subsequently sentenced in 2022 to life imprisonment by Turkish justice for “attempting to overthrow the government”through the funding of his anti-government protests “gezi movement” in 2013.

Kavala denies the accusations against him. During his trial, he had denounced a “judicial murder” as well as the influence of the head of state on the judiciary.

His conviction was upheld in late September by the Turkish Court of Cassation, despite a 2019 ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the judicial arm of the Council of Europe, which ruled that Kavala’s detention contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights and asked for his release.

“I am very sad that he is not with us to receive this award, this such an important award,” said his wife, Ayse Bougra Kavala, receiving the honor from the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Tini Cox.

Kavala was among three nominees for the Havel Prize, named after the dissident and later president of Czechoslovakia who died in 2011, along with Poland’s Justina Widrinska, who defends abortion rights in her country, and Ukraine’s Yevgeny Zakharov , founder of the “Putin Court,” which has been gathering evidence of war crimes committed since the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022.

Last year, the award was given to imprisoned Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza.