KIEV, December 14 (Itar-Tass) — Ukraine’s former Prime Minister, turned convict, Yulia Timoshenko has been nominated candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.
An initiative to nominate Timoshenko, who leads the oppositionist Batkivshchina /Fatherland/ party, came from her fellow-partisan supporters and leaders of Batkivshchina’s youth wing called the Young Fatherland.
They believe the Nobel Prize is the appropriate award commensurate with Timoshenko’s efforts “to prevent a disruption of natural gas supplies to Europe in 2009.”
As Ukraine’s Prime Minister at the time, “Timoshenko assumed a responsibility for signing an agreement, in the absence of which the countries of Europe might have lost any opportunities for warming themselves in the cold months of the year.”
Timoshenko’s political allies recall that she “fell victim to the arbitrariness of the judiciary system.”
The trial over the woman “was marked by encroachments on all the imaginable international standards,” the Batkivshchina parliamentary faction said in a statement.
“She was sentenced to seven years in jail on charges of the abuse of occupational powers,” it went on. “Now she is bed-ridden and is staying in the ward of an investigation center in Kiev.”
The procedure of selecting the candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize is a complicated one. The right to nominate the candidates belongs to separate persons rather than organizations so as to avoid the procedures pertaining to open voting.
Consultations on the candidates are held with philosophers, historians, specialists on law, and active public personalities.
The endorsed proposals should be submitted to the Nobel Prize Committee before February 1 of the year, in which the prize is awarded.
As of February 1, Nobel Prize Committees get down to business.
Committee members and consultants assess the qualifications of the candidates for the prizes and determine their contribution to humankind’s general progress.
A decision to award the Nobel Prize is taken by the Norwegian Nobel Committee independently.