2014 Right Livelihood Award Laureate Asma Jahangir on Defending Human Rights in Pakistan
Asma Jahangir received the Right Livelihood Award in 2014 for defending, protecting and promoting human rights in Pakistan.
Asma Jahangir (1952-2018) was Pakistan’s leading human rights lawyer. For three decades, she had shown incredible courage in defending the most vulnerable Pakistanis – women, children, religious minorities and the poor. Having founded the first legal aid centre in Pakistan in 1986, Jahangir had courageously taken on very complicated cases and won. For her relentless campaigning against laws that discriminate against women, and for continuously speaking truth to power, Jahangir had been threatened, assaulted in public and placed under house arrest. She made history when she was elected as the first female President of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan in 2010.
Asma Jahangir received the Right Livelihood Award in 2014 for defending, protecting and promoting human rights in Pakistan and more widely, often in very difficult and complex situations and at great personal risk.
