The Right Livelihood Award was presented on Wednesday to a leading AI researcher, a female lawyer from Pakistan, and two women's legal rights groups. This award, based in Sweden, honors work aimed at creating a fairer and more peaceful world.
History of the Right Livelihood Award
The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull, a Swedish-German philanthropist, to draw attention to achievements in environmental and international development that have been overlooked by the Nobel Prizes. This award is usually presented to winners a week before the Nobel Prizes.
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The Right Livelihood Organization announced that this year's winners were selected from 200 nominees from 72 countries and were recognized for "resisting systems that marginalize people and a shared insistence on bringing people back to the center."
This Year's Winners
Taimint Gheber, an AI researcher and founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, received the award for her work examining the impact of biases on artificial intelligence. In a statement, the Right Livelihood Organization noted that she was recognized for challenging centralized power in AI and pioneering justice-based digital technology, as well as her lived experience and human will.
Gheber, born in 2020 to an Ethiopian family with Eritrean roots, was one of the authors of a paper on the dangers of biases in large language models (LLMs) and worked on Google’s ethical AI team. According to the jury, Google fired her after she refused to retract the paper and remove her name.
Another award winner was Jalila Haider from Pakistan, who was recognized for breaking barriers as the first female lawyer from her Hazara community and challenging ethnic, governmental, and patriarchal harassment. Haider is known for defending some of the most vulnerable communities in her country against state repression, discrimination against women, and ethnic violence.
The Right Livelihood Organization stated: "Haider has brought justice to thousands targeted or ignored by the ruling powers, especially ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as refugees."
Another recipient of the award was the Rural Women's Assembly, which brings together over 178,000 small-scale farmers from 11 Southern African countries. This assembly was recognized for creating "a united force to advocate for land rights, seeds, and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal encroachments."
This assembly has also worked on producing and preserving local seed varieties to help protect a long-standing tradition of seed saving and exchange.
The Right Livelihood Award was also presented to the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA), recognized as the moral conscience of Georgian society. The jury stated that this group was honored for its efforts in "building and maintaining democracy in Georgia and preserving civil power against autocratic repression."
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