Swedish rights prize to Afghan burka opponent
Published: 27 Sep 12 11:29 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/43480/20120927/
Afghan human rights activist, ex-minister and burka opponent Sima Samar on Thursday won the Swedish Right Livelihood Award honouring those who work to improve the lives of others.
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Samar, 55, was honoured "for her longstanding and courageous dedication to human rights, especially the rights of women, in one of the most complex and dangerous regions in the world," the jury said in a statement.
A medical doctor by training, Samar fled to Pakistan in 1984 when her husband disappeared following his arrest by Afghanistan's communist regime.
She returned in 2001 to become her country's first minister of women's affairs, but had to resign after just six months after she criticized sharia law in an interview in Canada.
She was in 2002 named the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, which she still leads, and was from 2005 to 2009 the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Sudan.
Samar shares the 2012 Right Livelihood Award with American political theorist Gene Sharp, 84, whom the jury described as "the world's foremost expert on non-violent revolution", and a non-governmental organization campaigning for an end to British arms exports, Campaign Against Arms Trade.
An honorary prize was awarded to 90-year-old Hayrettin Karaca, "considered the grandfather of the Turkish environmental movement," the jury said.
Swedish-German philatelist Jakob von Uexküll founded the donor-funded prize in 1980 after the Nobel Foundation behind the Nobel Prizes refused to create awards honouring efforts in the fields of the environment and international development.
For this reason, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation often calls its distinction the "alternative Nobel prize."
The three Right Livelihood winners share the prize sum of 150,000 euros ($193,000).
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Samar is a woman of great courage and integrity, it will be interesting to see how the Swedish looney left cultural elite reacts. In many instances with silence, iI suspect, as befits the yellow cowards in their "genusforskning" ivory towers at Södertörns Högskola and elsewhere.
At least lets applaud for Sima which is a very brave woman.
haha genius!
Even when a couple sensible muslims in a pile of 1 billion doubts the wonderful burka tradition, which comes hand in hand with girl marriage, factual imprisonment of women by their husbands, lack of right to study, open a business or sometimes drive a car and all the other perfect stuff that women enjoy in islam, this award to the humanity is still calling it "muslims bashing".
Hey, hey. Masai push a tray into their lips. How come Samar does not care about that he? How about all of them rings on pygmies' necks? Eh Samar? Why not concentrate on them? After all, women in islam are HAPPY! And everyone saying otherwise is an islamophobe!
Your 8th century mentalities are showing AGAIN. You get upset when one of the ridiculous religious traditions like honor murders, pedophilia (i.e., forced marriage of children) and the religious orders for murder(fatwahs) issued by your "holy men" are questioned. So, you criticize the religious traditions of others. While those traditions may be equally ridiculous, they are not generally as life threatening as yours. Until you own up to your own problems and change your ways, including treating women with the respect they deserve, you have no right to try to change the subject by criticizing others.
I think you misunderstood. I don't think Uncle likes any of those things such as fatwas or honour killings, he is insulting them.