The winners of the annual Right Livelihood Award, announced on Wednesday, are two women and two women-led groups who “refused to wait for permission,” said the executive director of the award committee.
“A system built to serve the few was never going to hold," said Ole von Uexkull, who added that the winners of the 2026 award are "rewriting the rules that autocrats, patriarchs, and Silicon Valley’s most powerful men assumed were theirs to write alone.”
The honorees include Jalila Haider, a Pakistani human rights lawyer who was the first female attorney from her Hazara community; Timnit Gebru, an American artificial intelligence researcher who has challenged the consolidation of power in Big Tech and exposed the potential harms of AI; the Rural Women’s Assembly in South Africa, a movement of 78,000 small-scale farmers “united to defend land, seed, and bodily autonomy against corporate agribusiness and patriarchal dispossession”; and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), the country’s first human rights organization in Georgia, which has played a crucial role in its democratization.
The winners of the award, said Right Livelihood in a video about the 2026 laureates, “are making justice the center of the narrative.”
Haider has combined legal work with on-the-ground activism, leading a seven-day hunger strike in 2018 against the targeted killing of Hazaras, a Shia Muslim minority, by the Pakistani army. The strike forced the army chief to negotiate directly with Hazara women, “resulting in a sustained decrease in attacks against the community.”
Her law firm has also helped more than 600 political activists regain their freedom.
“Despite detention, cyberharassment, and death threats, she continues working toward a world where, in her words, ‘no human being is illegal,’” said Right Livelihood.
Gebru was fired from Google after authoring an academic paper that warned of the risks posed by large language models; she had been co-leading the company’s Ethics AI team. Now the founder and executive director of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), the organization’s distributed model “brings together researchers and collaborators across countries and continents, defying the centralized and corporate-driven concepts that mainstream AI entails.”
“What keeps me going is belief in human agency,” said Gebru in Right Livelihood’s video.
The Rural Women’s Assembly has “built one of the region’s largest autonomous platforms for rural women” with a volunteer structure, establishing 24 seed multiplication sites and "defending traditional seed systems from commercialization.
Its seed sovereignty efforts have challenged corporate control over South Africa’s food systems and strengthened “communities’ resilience to climate shocks,” according to Right Livelihood.
“We have the power, and we have the imagination that it will take to construct this new world, because another world is needed, and it’s urgent,” said the group’s regional coordinator, Mercia Andrews.
GYLA is the first Right Livelihood winner from Georgia since the award was established in 1980. The group provides grassroots legal aid and has secured landmark legal victories, including ones that have protected rights for people with disabilities and guaranteed free education for every child in Georgia.
The group has opted to remain in the country with a scaled-down team, despite Georgia’s repressive “foreign agents” law.
“With courage and determination, the organization presses on for a better future for all Georgians,” said Right Livelihood.
The awards, which include support for the winners’ work, are set to be presented on December 1 in Stockholm.
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