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The Right Livelihood Award, often called the alternative Nobel Prize, has this year honoured women and women-led organisations who, in the jury’s words, confront some of the world’s most deeply entrenched power structures: authoritarian rule, patriarchal violence and unregulated artificial intelligence development.
What they have in common is that they stand up to systems that push people to the margins.
Four laureates have been selected from 200 nominees in 72 countries. They will receive the award on 1 December in Stockholm.
One of them is Jalila Haider, a Pakistani human rights lawyer, recognised for breaking barriers as the first female lawyer from the Hazara community and for challenging ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution, guided by the conviction that “no person should be forced into illegality”, as the jury puts it.
The Rural Women’s Assembly is being honoured for forging a powerful movement of rural women in southern Africa, enabling them to defend their land, seeds and bodily autonomy against the tyranny of corporate interests and patriarchal exploitation, the jury said.
The Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association is recognised for its work, carried out despite political repression, to build and safeguard Georgian democracy and to protect civilian control of power.
Timnit Gebru, an Ethiopian-born computer scientist, is also among this year’s laureates. According to the citation, she has challenged the concentrated power in the field of artificial intelligence and played a pioneering role in developing digital technologies rooted in justice, real-life experience and an understanding of human agency.
The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 by German-Swedish writer and philatelist Jakob von Uexkull to honour those offering practical solutions to the planet’s and humanity’s most urgent problems.
The prize comes with long-term support intended to help the laureates expand and promote their work.