Stockholm has announced the winners of the Right Livelihood award, widely known as the alternative Nobel prize. This year, the prestigious honor was awarded to a prominent AI researcher, a human rights lawyer from Pakistan, and two women-led rights organizations.
Prominent US artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru was selected for her work challenging concentrated power in tech and advocating for digital justice. Gebru co-founded Black in AI in 2017 and later co-authored a groundbreaking paper on algorithmic bias while co-leading Google’s Ethical AI team. After parting ways with Google, she founded the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) to expose the harms of AI systems on marginalized communities.
Pakistani human rights lawyer Jalila Haider was honored for her courage as the first female lawyer from her Hazara community. She was recognized for fighting against ethnic persecution, state-level injustice, and patriarchal discrimination, guided by the belief that no human being is illegal.
Additionally, the Rural Women Assembly was recognized for unifying over 178,000 small-scale farmers across 11 Southern African nations to defend land rights and bodily autonomy against corporate exploitation. Finally, the Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA), Georgia’s oldest human rights group, received the award for safeguarding democracy and civic freedom against autocratic crackdowns.
The award was established in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull after the Nobel Foundation declined to create new honors for environmental and international development contributions.
