LAMYA HAJI BASHAR

HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS Award

An adolescence which was broken when she was only 16 years old, when she was abducted by the militants of the is and enslaved by Iraq boundaries, in 2014, because of her Yazidi belonging.

Yazidis are an ethnic group, which is thought to be unfaithful by fundamentalists, so that old men and women are killed while the younger girls are transferred firstly in Mosul, then near to Aleppo, under Is control.

Lamiya memories are made of ruins, mass graves and violence, since the first day of her enslavement. She and her sister refused to convert to Islam and they were raped by a group of men, then they were sold five times , like objects, and they were forced to become sex slaves.

After 2 years, with a life experience which has marked her entire life, some relatives of her payed a ransom and they managed to free her, but she inadvertently stepped on a mine which killed a friend of her and  left her with terrible injuries and almost blind.

She was treated in Germany where she still lives thanks to a humanitarian passport, which allows her to leave her country.

In 2016, she was awarded the Sakharov Prize for human rights by the European Parliament.

Now she is engaged to defend her people’s rights, for whom she can’t see an optimistic future.

Her happiness for being free and alive is still blurred by the thought of so many women who are still with their capturer. For them she asks to the International Community to give psychological assistance once they will be free: “I’ll be the voice of voiceless”.