Jalila Haider wins 2026 Right Livelihood Award

Pakistani human rights lawyer and activist Jalila Haider has received the 2026 Right Livelihood Award in recognition of her work for vulnerable communities and her efforts to challenge ethnic, state and patriarchal discrimination.

The Sweden-based Right Livelihood Foundation announced Haider among this year’s recipients, recognising her as the first woman lawyer from Pakistan’s Hazara community and highlighting her longstanding work against ethnic violence, gender discrimination and human rights violations.

The award, often described as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”, was established in 1980 to honour individuals and organisations working for social justice, human rights, environmental protection and sustainable development.

The foundation said Haider had combined legal advocacy, grassroots activism and community empowerment to support marginalised groups, particularly ethnic, gender and religious minorities and refugees.

Among her notable campaigns was a seven-day hunger strike in 2018 against targeted attacks on the Hazara community. The protest led to direct engagement between Hazara women and Pakistan’s military leadership and was followed by a sustained decline in attacks against the community, according to the foundation.

Haider is also a founding member of the Women’s Democratic Front and played a role in organising Balochistan’s first Women’s March. Her organisation, We the Humans, has helped hundreds of widows of terrorism victims develop financial independence.

The Right Livelihood Foundation said Haider’s legal work had also helped restore freedom of movement for more than 600 political activists and human rights defenders.

Other recipients of the 2026 award include US artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru, the Rural Women’s Assembly, a grassroots movement representing small-scale farmers across 11 Southern African countries, and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association.

Gebru was recognised for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and promoting technology development based on justice and human agency.

The Rural Women’s Assembly was honoured for its work with small-scale farmers, while the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association received recognition for its long-standing human rights work.

The Right Livelihood Foundation said the awards recognise people and organisations working to advance a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.