Trident Ploughshares today congratulated this year’s recipients of the Right Livelihood Award for outstanding work. This year’s recipients are Paul Walker one of the most effective advocates for the abolition of chemical weapons, Raji Sourani who has defended and promoted human rights in Palestine and across the Arab World for 35 years, Dr. Denis Mukwege, a gynaecologist and chief surgeon of Panzi hospital in the war-torn region of Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who with his colleagues have treated about 40,000 rape victims, and Swiss agronomist/entomologist Dr. Hans R. Herren, one of the world’s leading experts on biological pest control and sustainable agriculture. The Award is considered the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.
Trident Ploughshares was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for its work for nuclear disarmament in 2001. Angie Zelter, founder of the disarmament campaigning group which has organised hundreds of nonviolent direct actions at the UKs nuclear weapons bases and factories, with more than 2500 arrests over more than fifteen years, said “Trident Ploughshares congratulates the recipients of this years Right Livelihood Award. Each of them has done sterling work to make our precious world a better place. We particularly welcome the award going to Paul Walker for his outstanding and effective work promoting and carrying out the abolition of chemical weapons. Paul Walker’s persistent and successful work to insure the abolition of chemical weapons, and his contribution to campaigns for nuclear disarmament, reminds us that the abolition of nuclear weapons is likewise achievable.”
“The award will help to highlight the urgent need for the few countries remaining outside the Chemical Weapons Convention, including Israel and Egypt, to commit to it as Syria has now done and for all states in the region, including Israel, which possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons, to take part in talks on a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. And it will highlight the urgency of banning nuclear weapons and finally ending the dangerous reliance on nuclear weapons for security. We at Trident Ploughshares take this as a call to redouble our efforts to achieve the elusive goal of global nuclear disarmament.”
For more information on the Right Livelihood, including this year’s and past recipients and a video see here. :www.rightlivelihood.org/