Winner awarded prize by Foreign Secretary David Miliband!

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UNA-UK ran a human rights competition throughout 2007-08.

Entitled ‘Who is YOUR human rights hero?’ the competition aimed to get people thinking about human rights defenders - brave women and men, both famous and unknown, who have often at great cost taken a stand for the Universal Declaration.

Contestants were invited to send in 100 words arguing the case for a particular human rights defender. They could choose someone from our tribute to human rights champions in our flagship magazine New World, or a woman, man or group they believed was conspicuously missing.

The winner of the competition is Thupten Palden. Thupten is a 19-year-old Tibetan student at Hastings College of Arts & Technology, and the Treasurer of the UNA-UK group there. His human rights hero is Tsering Woeser, the Tibetan poet, essayist and blogger whose works have been banned in China and Tibet. Thupten’s entry argues that Woeser deserves special recognition for her championing of freedom of opinion and expression.

The Foreign Secretary David Miliband presented Thupten with his prize on behalf of UNA-UK at an event hosted by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to mark UDHR60.

Read about the event on the FCO website

Runners up

An honourable mention goes to the following people for their thought-provoking submissions:

• Mollie Whittemore (nominated: Sir Ludwig Guttmann, founder of Paralympic Games)
• Samreen Aslam (nominated Asma Jahangir, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion)
• UNA West Oxfordshire branch (nominated the 233,000 people who voted for the opposition in the run-off presidential election in Zimbabwe earlier this year)
  

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