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- Associated Press
The Right Livelihood Award was awarded Wednesday to two women and two women-led organizations challenging authoritarian rule, violence and discrimination against women, and the harms caused by artificial intelligence, the Stockholm-based foundation said
The recipients of the international award are a Pakistani lawyer, an Ethiopian-born AI researcher, a Georgian legal rights group and a network of women farmers across Southern Africa.
The annual prize was created in 1980 by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, who wanted to honor work that contributes to a more just and peaceful world. It is traditionally announced shortly before the Nobel Prizes, which will be announced starting next Monday.
Right Livelihood said this year’s recipients were being awarded for their “resistance to systems that push people to the margins, and a shared insistence on putting people back at the center.” They were chosen from 200 nominations from 72 countries.
“A system built to serve the few was never going to hold. This year, we honor women who refused to wait for permission,” Ole von Uexkull, the nephew of the prize founder and the organization’s executive director, said. “They are rewriting the rules that autocrats, patriarchs and Silicon Valley’s most powerful men assumed were theirs to write alone.”
Here is a look at the recipients:
A Pakistani lawyer who works to protect vulnerable communities
Jalila Haider, a human rights lawyer who defends some of Pakistan’s most vulnerable communities from state repression, discrimination against women and ethnic violence, was awarded the prize “for breaking barriers, as the first female lawyer from her Hazara community, to challenge ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution, guided by the conviction that no human being is illegal.”
A Southern African women farmers’ group defending land rights
Also awarded was the Rural Women’s Assembly “for organizing rural women across Southern Africa into a united force defending land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession.”
The Rural Women’s Assembly is a self-organized, movement of more than 178,000 small-scale farmers across 11 Southern African nations. It has established 24 sites where farmers reproduce and preserve seeds for future planting and documented hundreds of local seed varieties, helping protect the practice of saving and exchanging traditional seeds, the Swedish foundation said.
A Georgian human rights group working to safeguard democracy
The Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association won the prize “for building and safeguarding Georgian democracy and sustaining civic power in the face of an autocratic crackdown.”
The group was founded in 1994 by volunteer lawyers who helped draft the country’s first postindependence constitution.
According to Right Livelihood, it has secured major legal victories that reshaped national policy, including protections for people with disabilities, free education for all children and compensation for victims of Soviet-era repression.
A researcher who exposes harms that AI is already causing
Right Livelihood also honored AI researcher Timnit Gebru “for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”
Gebru, who was born in Ethiopia to a family of Eritrean origin, is the founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute.
Right Livelihood said her work challenges the control that a small number of powerful companies exercise over AI and exposes harms that AI systems are already causing, particularly to communities facing discrimination and exclusion.
