Alexei Navalny daughter accepts human rights award on his behalf
Geneva, Jun 8: The daughter of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny accepted a human rights award on her father's behalf on Tuesday for his courage in facing down President Vladimir Putin's government.
Daria Navalnaya, a 20-year-old student at Stanford University in California, said her father was dedicating the courage award given by the Geneva Summit for Human Rights to all political prisoners in Russia and Belarus.
You really should be looking at my father instead, but he's in a Russian prison right now simply because of what he says, does and believes in and because he didn't die when the Russian government wanted him to, Navalnaya said in a video message for the online event.
Navalny was arrested in January upon his return from Germany, where he had spent five months recuperating from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin accusations that Russian officials dismiss. He was given a 2 1/2-year prison sentence in February for violating terms of a suspended sentence stemming from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he denounced as politically motivated.
He went on a 24-day hunger strike in prison to protest the lack of medical treatment for severe back pain and numbness in his legs, ending it in April after getting the medical attention he demanded.
Navalny was chosen as this year's recipient for its annual courage award by more than two dozen human rights groups.
His daughter said her father wrote her a letter from behind bars after he was chosen.
In his letter my dad asked me today to give this award to every single political prisoner in Russia and Belarus, Navalnya said.
Also taking part in the event was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main challenger in a vote in August in Belarus in which authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko won a sixth term. That victory that was widely seen as rigged.
In a nod to her father's sense of humor, Navalnaya said he wrote in the letter: First and most importantly, please do not screw up your first public performance. And second, don't forget to say how extremely proud I am to receive this high award.
Navalnaya, while active in blogging and standing up for her dad, has rarely made public appearances.
Navalny was given the award for his extraordinary courage and heroic efforts to sound the alarm about the Putin regime's grave violations of the human rights of the Russian people, said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, which co-organizes the event.
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Two injuries, one DNF, a DQ as India end messy World Relays campaign
Gaborone (Botswana) (PTI): Amoj Jacob and Ragul Kumar got injured during the men's 4x400m and 4x100 races respectively as India ended their World Athletics Relays campaign in disappointment on the second day of competitions here on Sunday.
The Indian camp had high hopes of making the 2027 World Championships in the men's 4x400m relay but the team did not finish (DNF) the race as Jacob suffered cramps and pulled out of the race after taking the baton from the first leg runner Dharamveer Choudhary. Rajesh Ramesh and Vishal TK were to run in the third and fourth legs.
Those teams which could not qualify for the 2027 Beijing World Championships by reaching the final round of each of the six relay events on Saturday were given another chance in the second qualification round on Sunday.
The top two teams in each of the two heats (in all six relay events) booked the Beijing ticket on Sunday.
India will now have to try and qualify for the World Championships through the Top Lists of the World Athletics, which is a long and tedious process.
In the men's 4x100m race, third leg runner Ragul Kumar fell down the track after failing to hand over the baton inside the exchange zone to fourth leg runner Gurindervir Singh, which clearly showed the lack of coordination among the runners.
Harsh Santosh Raut and Animesh Kujur ran the first two legs.
The Indian quartet was disqualified and Kumar was seen being taken away from the Field of Play with the help of the volunteers.
It was a comedy of errors in the case of the women's 4x100m race, which saw the baton being dropped during an exchange between first leg runner Tamanna and second runner Nithya Gandhe, though the Indians finished the race in 53.09 seconds.
Gandhe started running quite a distance, but after realising that the baton was not in her hand, she turned and ran back to pick it up.
The only silver-lining for the Indian contingent was the national record time in the mixed 4x100m relay race, though the quartet of Ragul Kumar, Nithya Gandhe, Animesh Kujur and Sneha SS finished sixth in heat number two with a time of 41.35 seconds, bettering the previous national mark of 42.30 seconds set in March in Chandigarh.
The mixed 4x400m relay quartet of Theerthesh P Shetty, Kumari Saloni, Nihal William and Rashdeep Kaur ended at fifth in heat number one with a time of 3 minutes and 19.40 seconds.
On Saturday, all the five Indian relay teams had failed to make it to the respective final rounds and thus missed out on the 2027 World Championships berths.
