Dimona plant
Dimona plantIsrael news photo: (file)

Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu is being awarded another prize by the international community.

The former nuclear technician who spent 18 years in prison for revealing Israel’s most classified secrets is slated to receive the 2010 Carl von Ossietsky Medal.

The prize will be presented by the International League for Human Rights in a special ceremony in Berlin on December 12 – but Vanunu is unlikely to attend. He remains restricted from travel outside Israel by court mandate.

In the past, the former nuclear worker has been rewarded numerous times for his treason against the State of Israel by several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Vanunu’s courageous conduct unquestionably recalls Carl von Ossietsky’s undaunted resistance against armament during the Weimar Republic,” said International League for Human Rights in a statement on its website.

Ossietsky was a German pacifist and journalist convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 after he published information on the Nazi violations of the Treaty of Versailles. Ossietsky was eventually taken to a concentration camp, where he was murdered.

After leaving his job as a technician in the Dimona nuclear plant where he had worked for nine years, Vanunu in 1986 released information to a British newspaper about the Negev Nuclear Research Center.

He was later lured by a female Mossad agent to Rome, where he was captured and brought back to Israel. Vanunu was tried and convicted in a military tribunal that sentenced him in March 1988 to 18 years in prison on charges of treason and espionage.

He was again arrested this past May and jailed for three months after he violated his parole by meeting with a foreign journalist.