Refusenik authorities to significantly increase the emigration quota. In the years 1960 through 1970, only about 3,000 Soviet Jews had (legally) emigrated from the USSR; after the trial, in the period from 1971 to 1980 347,100 people received a visa to leave the USSR, 245,951 of them were Jews. Refuseniks included Jews who desired to emigrate on religious grounds, Jews seeking to immigrate to Israel for Zionist aspirations, and relatively secular Jews desiring to escape continuous state-sponsored antisemitism. A leading proponent and spokesman for the refusenik rights during the mid-1970s was Natan Sharansky. Sharansky's involvement with the Moscow Helsinki Group helped
Mudawi Ibrahim Adam Salah Mohamed Abdelrahman. Mudawi was then held for two months without a formal charge, during which time he began a hunger strike in protest. His arrests were widely protested by groups including Human Rights Watch, Front Line Defenders, Amnesty International, and the Irish government. He was eventually released without being brought to trial. By 2006, Mudawi's role had become prominent enough that "New York Times" reporter Nicholas Kristof described him as "one of the leading human rights advocates in Sudan". In 2007, he attended a conference in Prague organized by Natan Sharansky, Václav Havel, and José María Aznar, where he