Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai wins EU human rights prize

A Pakistani teenage activist shot in the head by the Taliban last year for campaigning for better rights for girls, won the European Union's annual human rights award on Thursday, beating fugitive U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.
Malala Yousafzai, 16, who was attacked in northwestern Pakistan by a group of gunmen who fired on her school bus, is also a favourite among experts and betting agencies to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought is given by the European Parliament each year since 1988 to commemorate Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov. Its past winners include Nelson Mandela and Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi.
Snowden had been nominated by the Green group in the parliament for what it said was his "enormous service" to human rights and European citizens when he disclosed secret U.S. surveillance programmes.
Yousafzai was chosen as the winner after a vote among the heads of all the political groups in the 750-member parliament.
Yousafzai, spoke on Thursday of the possibility of winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize and said she might like to be Pakistan's prime minister one day.
"If I get the Nobel Peace Prize, I think it will be such a great honor, and more than I deserve, and such a great responsibility as well," she told an audience at a New York City cultural center on Thursday night.
A win would "help me to begin this campaign for girls' education, but the real goal, the most precious goal that I want to get and for which I am thirsty and I want to struggle hard for, that is the award of seeing every child to go to school," she added.
She has not returned to Pakistan since she was attacked, and says she misses it. She mostly listened to Western music back home in her village, particularly that by Justin Bieber, but now is listening to more Pashto and Urdu music to remind her of home.
When she returns, she said, she wants to tell the Taliban to "be peaceful, and that their jihad is to fight through pens, through words."