December, 05 2011, 03:44am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
RIGHT LIVELIHOOD AWARD FOUNDATION
Kajsa Övergaard, Foundation Manager;
Birgit Jaeckel, Communications Consultant
Phone: +46 8 70 20 340, Fax: +46 8 70 20 338
info[at]rightlivelihood.org
For UK media:
UK Press Office
Deepa Vyas
Phone: +44 207 378 1234
info[at]kinrossrender.com
For German, Austrian and Swiss media:
Holger Michel
Phone: +49 30 23 63 48 83
info[at]holger-michel.eu
2011 Right Livelihood Awards to Be Presented in Stockholm
In the lead-up to tonight's Award Ceremony, the Recipients of the 2011 Right Livelihood Awards (often referred to as the "Alternative Nobel Prizes") presented themselves at a press conference in Stockholm.
Huang Ming (China):
INTERNATIONAL
In the lead-up to tonight's Award Ceremony, the Recipients of the 2011 Right Livelihood Awards (often referred to as the "Alternative Nobel Prizes") presented themselves at a press conference in Stockholm.
Huang Ming (China):
"When I had my baby daughter, I realized that in a couple of decades, when the oil runs out, I will leave this world, but my daughter will have to face a world of cold homes and a polluted environment. Will she then, one day, point at my gravestone and say 'It is all because you used up the oil'?
I was afraid the next generation would put the blame on us, and that is why in 1995 I turned to engaging in the solar energy business, and established the Himin Solar Energy company. Ever since then our vision and effort has been to bring about a world with blue skies and white clouds for our children and grandchildren, through the global transition to renewable energy."
Jacqueline Moudeina (Chad):
"In Africa, impunity is a cancer eating away at our continent and preventing us from expressing our true potential. I will continue my struggle for human rights until the cry of those suffering from injustice is heard by their leaders and by the international community. We would have liked to see the former Chadian dictator Habre charged on African soil, but after more than twenty years, we cannot wait anymore. It is time that Senegal extradite Habre to Belgium for his trial."
Renee Vellve, representing GRAIN:
"GRAIN calls for an immediate end to the current wave of land grabbing. The flow of money from pension funds, investors and agribusiness to buy up or lease farmland in developing countries must stop now. All the affected lands must be immediately returned to the farmers and local communities."
"We will not solve the global food crisis until people stop trying to replace small-scale family farming systems with large-scale corporate-controlled industrial approaches. We need a food system that feeds people, not markets."
Ina May Gaskin (USA):
"I accept the Right Livelihood Award in the name of the midwives, physicians, doulas, and birth activists who affirm childbirth as a creative act, best performed by the mother in the setting of her choice, without unnecessary medical interference being imposed upon her.
Home birth midwives are being persecuted in every country, even in The Netherlands, where home birth services have a long and honorable tradition. Right now, the situation in Hungary greatly disturbs me. Dr. Agnes Gereb has spent more than 20 years trying to defend the fundamental rights of mother and child. For this, she has been imprisoned, recently received a further 2 year prison sentence and has been held under house arrest for the past year. I now ask the Hungarian government to intervene to stop the abuse and unjust treatment of this internationally respected homebirth expert!"
Award Ceremony
It is the Right Livelihood Award Foundation's 32th Prize Presentation. There are now 145 Laureates from 61 countries.
Huang Ming receives an Honorary Award, the other three Award Recipients share the EUR150,000 cash award, receiving EUR50,000 each.
The Right Livelihood Awards will be presented in the Second Chamber of the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm tonight, 5 December. The Award Ceremony starts at 6 pm.
Further information & Media material
The award acceptance speeches will be made available today at 6 pm at our website's Press Room
There will be a live web-stream from the ceremony accessible via our website.
For more information about the Award Ceremony and press accreditation please see our last press release
Further information and material supporting this press release can be accessed via www.rightlivelihood.org
For videos and high-resolution pictures, please also refer to https://download.rightlivelihood.org
Please note that we are going to upload video and pictures from the ceremony to our ftp-server as soon as possible, so please check back.
The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 to "honour and support courageous people solving global problems". It has become widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' and there are now 182 Laureates from 72 countries.
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Stateless Palestinian Woman Details 'Very Traumatizing' Abuse Suffered in ICE Detention
Trump administration immigration officials reportedly dismissed Ward Sakeik's ordeal as a "sob story."
Jul 06, 2025
A newlywed Palestinian woman from Texas released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention earlier this week says she was shackled for long periods, denied food and water, and subjected to other human rights abuses during nearly five months in ICE custody—all because she is a stateless person.
Ward Sakeik, 22, was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents from Gaza. Because Saudi Arabia does not grant birthright citizenship to the children of foreign nationals, Sakeik was officially stateless when her family legally emigrated to the United States when she was 8 years old.
“I was moved around like cattle.”
Ward Sakeik, US college graduate and homeowner, speaks out following 140 days in ICE hellhole pic.twitter.com/bNTgs7362h
— World Socialist Web Site (@WSWS_Updates) July 5, 2025
Sakeik's parents subsequently applied for—and were denied—asylum in the U.S. but were allowed to remain legally in the country pending routine check-ins with ICE.
After graduating high school and the University of Texas, Arlington, starting a wedding photography business, marrying a U.S. citizen, and beginning the process of obtaining a green card, Sakeik and her husband went on their honeymoon in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She was detained shortly after arriving back in the United States after Customs and Border Protection agents flagged her for flying over international waters—a move that Department of Homeland Security officials said violated immigration policy.
"After a few hours from returning from our honeymoon, I was put in a gray tracksuit and shackles," Sakeik said at a press conference following her release. "I was handcuffed for 16 hours without any water or food on the bus. I have moved around like cattle. And the U.S. government attempted to dump me in a part of the world where I don't know where I'm going and what I'm doing or anything."
"We were not given any water or food, and we could smell the driver eating Chick-fil-A," she continued. "We would ask for water, bang on the door for food, and he would just turn up the radio and act like he wasn't listening to us."
Sakeik said unhygienic conditions at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas—where an ICE officer was shot in the neck during a Friday evening attack—caused widespread illness among detainees.
"The restrooms are also very, very, very unhygienic," she said. "The beds have rust everywhere. They're not properly maintained. And cockroaches, grasshoppers, spiders, you name it, are all over the facility. Girls would get bit."
"I wouldn't wish this upon anybody," Sakeik said during a Saturday interview on CNN. "It was very hard, very traumatizing, and very, very difficult."
Eric Lee, an attorney for Sakeik, told CNN that immigration officials dismissed Sakeik's account as a "sob story."
"I guess what we would ask the American people is, 'Who are they gonna believe, their lying eyes or the statements of the people who are responsible for carrying out what are really crimes against humanity here in the United States?'" Lee added.
Sakeik said she now plans to advocate on behalf of women and girls imprisoned by ICE.
"I... want the world to know that the women who do come here come here for a better life, but they're criminalized for that," she said. "They are dehumanized, and they're stripped away from their rights. We have been treated as a 'less-than' just simply for wanting a better life."
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As the death toll from catastrophic flooding in Texas continued to rise, climate scientists this weekend underscored the link between more frequent and severe extreme weather events and the worsening climate emergency caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels.
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While some local officials blamed what they said were faulty forecasts from the National Weather Service—which has been hit hard by staffing cuts ordered by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency in line with Project 2025—meteorologists and climate scientists including Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles have refuted such allegations, citing multiple NWS warnings of potentially deadly flooding.
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Climate scientists do concur that human-caused global heating is causing stronger and more frequent extreme weather events including flooding.
"This kind of record-shattering rain (caused by slow-moving torrential thunderstorms) event is *precisely* that which is increasing the fastest in a warming climate," Swain wrote in a statement. "So it's not a question of whether climate change played a role—it's only a question of how much."
As Jeff Masters and Bob Henson wrote Saturday for Yale Climate Connections:
Many studies have confirmed that human-caused climate change is making the heaviest short-term rainfall events more intense, largely by warming the world's oceans and thus sending more water vapor into the atmosphere that can fuel heavy rain events. Sea surface temperatures this week have been as much as 1°F below the 1981-2010 average for early July in the western Gulf [of Mexico] and Caribbean, but up to 1°F above average in the central Gulf. Long-term human-caused warming made the latter up to 10 times more likely, according to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central.
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It’s hard to make the Texas flood tragedy worse, except to know that on the same day Trump signed a bill to stop our efforts to defeat the climate change that is causing increased frequency of disastrous floods. And giving us more expensive electricity. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/c...
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— Governor Jay Inslee (@govjayinslee.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Instead of taking action to combat the planetary emergency, the Trump administration is ramping up fossil fuel production while waging war on clean energy and climate initiatives. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by Trump on Friday slashes the tax credits for electric vehicles and other renewable technologies including wind and solar energy that were a cornerstone of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
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Metropolitan Police arrested at least 27 protesters who gathered in central London on Saturday to publicly support Palestine Action, a nonviolent direct action group now officially designated a terrorist organization by the U.K. government.
According to Middle East Eye, Palestine defenders including 83-year-old Rev. Sue Parfitt, a former government attorney, an emeritus professor, and health workers gathered by a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, where they held signs reading, "I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION."
Members of the group Defend Our Juries informed Metropolitan Police of their plan prior to the demonstration.
"If we cannot speak freely about the genocide that is occurring... democracy and human rights in this country are dead."
"We would like to alert you to the fact we may be committing offenses under the Terrorism Act tomorrow, Saturday 5 July, in Parliament Square at about 1pm," the group said in an open letter to Met Commissioner Mark Rowley.
"If we cannot speak freely about the genocide that is occurring, if we cannot condemn those who are complicit in it and express support for those who resist it, then the right to freedom of expression has no meaning, and democracy and human rights in this country are dead," the letter argues.
Parfitt told Novara Media that members of Defend Our Juries were "testing the law."
"I know that we are in the right place doing the right thing," she said. "...We cannot be bystanders."
"We are losing our civil liberties, we must stop that for everybody's sake," Parfitt said in a separate interview with The Guardian.
Prior to his arrest, Defend Our Juries member Tim Crosland, the former government lawyer, told The Guardian that "what we're doing here as a group of priests, teachers, health workers, human rights lawyers [is] we're refusing to be silenced."
"Because it goes to the core of what we believe in: that we oppose genocide—I didn't think that was that controversial—and we support the people who resist genocide," he added. "In theory we are now terrorist supporters and can go to prison for 14 years, which is kind of crazy. I think what we are here to do is just expose the craziness of that."
Crosland said as he was being arrested, "This is what happens in modern day Britain for opposing genocide, it's quite something isn't it?"
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Members of the group Defend Our Juries publicly declare their opposition to Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and their support for the proscribed group Palestine Action while Metropolitan Police officers look on before arresting them during a July 4, 2025 demonstration in London. (Photo: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
In a statement, Defend Our Juries sarcastically said that "we commend the counter-terrorism police for their decisive action in protecting the people of London from some cardboard signs opposing the genocide in Gaza and expressing support for those taking action to prevent it."
"It's a relief to know that counter-terrorism police have nothing better to do," the group quipped.
Last week, British lawmakers voted to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group after some of its members vandalized two aircraft at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire on June 20. The group—which was founded in 2020 and has also vandalized U.S. President Donald Trump's golf course in Turnberry, Scotland—is known for taking direction action against companies that supply weapons to Israel, which is accused of genocide in an ongoing International Court of Justice case concerning the war on Gaza.
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Palestine Action tried to delay the ban via legal action. However, the High Court on Friday denied the group's appeal for interim relief was denied on Friday, a decision that was upheld by the Court of Appeal.
The nonviolent group is now on the same legal footing in Britain as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Joining or supporting Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years behind bars.
At midnight, Palestine Action will be proscribed under the Terrorism Act.Their real “crime”? Exposing the UK’s role in arming Israel’s genocide.This is a dark day for our democracy.Criminalising non-violent resistance won’t silence the truth.We are all Palestine Action 🇵🇸
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— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana.bsky.social) July 4, 2025 at 2:38 PM
Earlier this month, a group of United Nations experts urged the U.K. government to not ban Palestine Action.
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The U.N. experts warned that under the ban, "individuals could be prosecuted for peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression and opinion, assembly, association, and participation in political life."
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Hundreds of jurists, artists and entertainers, and others have also decried the ban on Palestine Action.
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