Human Rights Award Laureate
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Sonia Pierre
Tags Share Sonia Pierre led the movement against a century of state-sponsored racial discrimination by the Dominican government against Dominicans of Haitian descent. The target of hate crimes, Dominicans with a Haitian background are also denied citizenship and face the threat of deportation from the country in which they were born, worked, and raised a…
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Delphine Djiraibe
Tags Share In a country stricken with the effects of decades of civil war, continuing violence and the violation of fundamental rights, Djiraibe, a human rights attorney and co-founder of the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, fights to protect the human rights of Chadian civilians and to prevent further environmental…
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Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Tags Share Unbeknownst to many Americans, agriculture in the United States is rife with human rights abuses. In the multi-billion dollar farming industry, corporations negotiate with growers to purchase mass quantities of product for the lowest possible prices. Farmworkers have borne the brunt of this market pressure, in part because their rights to organize and…
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Darci Frigo
Tags Share Darci Frigo, the founder of the NGO Terra de Direitos (TDD), fights to give land to the landless, put an end to modern-day slavery, ensure more sustainable stewardship of the land and protect Brazil’s biodiversity. He is a former seminarian and passionate defender of the landless poor in Brazil. As an attorney he…
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Loune Viaud
Tags Share In January of 2010, Loune Viaud attended a meeting of public health experts in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to discuss the nation’s recovery from four devastating hurricanes that had erased most of the country’s infrastructure. Loune had already made a tremendous difference in Haiti. With her colleagues at Zanmi Lasante and Partners in Health, she…
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Martin Macwan
Tags Share India abolished discrimination against its “untouchables,” or dalits, more than 60 years ago. But despite real progress, centuries of subjugation have left a residue of discrimination that has proven difficult to eradicate, especially in rural areas, where Dalits suffer atrocities at a disproportionate rate, and authorities are often slow to respond to complaints.…
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Archbishop Michael Kpakala Francis
Tags Share Following the wreckage of Liberia’s first civil war, Archbishop Michael Kpakala Francis became a vital voice for positive change, calling upon the international community to help keep peace, reconstruct the nation, and usher Liberia towards democracy. His organizations, the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission and Radio Veritas, have worked with Robert F. Kennedy…
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Mario Calixto
Tags Share Mario Calixto was the President of the Human Rights Committee of Sabana de Torres in the 1990s and was repeatedly threatened by paramilitary groups for his denunciation of their activities. As of 1988 he has been living in exile in Spain.
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Gloria Florez
Tags Share Gloria Florez is a Colombian activist on behalf of displaced persons. She is the head of MINGA, an “Association for Alternative Social Policy”. In 2004, MINGA advocated on behalf of the people of the Catatumbo region, 30,000 of whom were displaced following heavy fighting.
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Jaime Prieto Mendez
Tags Share Jaime Prieto Mendez is a leading figure in the Colombian human rights movement. Prieto began his career as a teacher in a poor area of Bogotá. Feeling that lack of “human rights literacy” increased the abuses against the poor, he began a human rights education program for which he was later imprisoned. In…
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Berenice Celeita Alayon
Tags Share Berenice Celeita Alayon attributes the beginning of her human rights activism to the 1985 Palace of Justice siege in which M-19 guerrillas took the Supreme Court of Colombia hostage, killing 11 of its 25 justices. At the time Celeita was a freshman in college and lost several of her professors. She later founded…
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Anonymous
Tags Share “Courage means a lot of things to me: it means commitment, it means hope. It means thinking first of others. It means a strong belief in human rights, a strong belief in the power of the people, and it means turning our backs on the power of the rulers. Courage will bring change…
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