British historian, journalist Garton Ash received honorary doctorate from Lithuania's VMU

VILNIUS – British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash was awarded an honorary doctorate at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas on Monday.

Garton Ash received the accolade for his merits in the fields of international cooperation and democracy-building, as well as for his significant contribution to the promotion of the values of freedom, justice, and solidarity, the university said on Tuesday.

Garton Ash is aprofessor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, a fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has written 11 books on Europe's transformation over the past 50 years.

In the 1980s, he was foreign news editor of The Spectator and a columnist for The Independent. Since 2004, he has been a columnist for The Guardian, a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books, and the translations of his texts have appeared in the Turkish daily Radikal and the Spanish daily El Pais, as well as other publications.