In a year already filled with tragedy, more bad news has landed upon the doorstep of accused spy Edward Snowden. It seems that he’s in line to receive a prestigious award from the PEN free speech and literary organization. Unfortunately, in order to accept the award in person he would need to travel to Norway. His hopes to do so were dashed when that country’s Supreme Court informed him that they could not assure his free passage to and from the event without someone from the NSA or other intelligence organizations showing up to chat with him about a court appearance back home in the United States. This surely must come as a crushing blow during the height of both the holiday and award show seasons. (ABC News)

Norway’s Supreme Court has rejected Edward Snowden’s request for a legal guarantee that would allow him to collect an award in the Scandinavian country without risk of being extradited to the United States.

In its ruling Friday, the Supreme Court upheld decisions by lower courts that also refused the request.

An Oslo law firm filed the lawsuit in April on behalf of the former National Security Agency contractor and the Norwegian chapter of the free speech and literary organization PEN, which had invited Snowden to receive its Ossietzky Prize.

That’s a darned shame. I’m sure he’d like to have a von Ossietzky on his shelf back home in Moscow… whatever that is. The prize in question is described as follows:

The Carl von Ossietzky prize is awarded annually for efforts to uphold freedom of speech and expression. A German pacifist, von Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 for works exposing Germany’s re-armament program in the lead-up to World War II.

The Europeans must really like giving awards to Snowden because this is far from his first turn on the dance floor for these types of honors. He was the recipient of the von Ossietzky medal from the International League for Human Rights in 2014. Last year Norway tapped him for the Bjornson Prize (awarded for free speech).

In case you’ve forgotten the details you can read the full list of espionage charges awaiting Snowden if we ever get our hands on that little weasel at this Washington Post archive.

Good for Norway I suppose. It’s nice to see one of our supposed allies being at least a bit willing to help us uphold our laws. Perhaps this could set a positive example for Poland, where they seem to keep coming up with one excuse after another to not allow us to pick up convicted child rapist Roman Polanski. To be fair, they’ve started a new round of extradition proceedings at our request this year, but we’ve been down this road too many times for us to get our hopes up. Every time we get close he slips through our grasp yet again, and for all we know he’s continued to rape young children for decades on end.

Hey… that gives me an idea. Do you suppose we could convince the Norwegians to set up Polanski with one of these von Ossietzky prizes? If we know anything about that monster it’s that the guy can almost never resist a good award ceremony in his honor. Somebody pitch this plan to the FBI ASAP.