Posts Tagged ‘Tang Prize’

Tang Prize recipients in rule of law category make clear the challenges they face

September 21, 2020
On 21 September 2020 William Yen reported in Taiwan Focus on the Tang Prize 2020. Three NGOs that have won the 2020 Tang Prize for their significant contributions to the rule of law participated on-line in the Tang Prize Masters’ Forum in Rule of Law, organized by the Tang Prize Foundation and National Taiwan University’s College of Law. [see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_Prize]
See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2016/06/22/2016-tang-prizes-to-louise-arbour-and-us-sinologist/
They are:
  • The Bangladesh Environment Lawyers Association (BELA),
  • The Colombian Dejusticia: The Center for Law, Justice and Society, and
  • The Legal Agenda, Lebanon.
Syeda Rizwana Hasan, chief executive of BELA, which promotes environmental justice and works toward sound environmental jurisprudence, said :”Corporate interests often take over public interests and the state loses its entity as a regulator and sides so much with the corporation that you can’t really differentiate which one is the state and which one is the corporation,”. This greatly impacts NGOs, as 430 environmental human rights defenders in Bangladesh were killed last year because they were fighting against mining projects or defending the rights of indigenous communities, Hasan said. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2014/04/27/abu-bakar-siddique-released-but-worries-remain-for-human-rights-defenders-in-bangladesh/ “Authoritarian regimes are increasingly branding NGOs as foreign agents, enemies of the state and anti-development elements. They are trying to criminalize our entity and our functioning, they are trying to seize powers so they can assess our performances and delicense us if we go against their developmental narratives,” Hasan said.

Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes, co-founder of Dejusticia, which aims to strengthen the rule of law on issues such as discrimination against race and gender, said the challenges his organization, like many other NGOs will face in the future, will be the question of how to obtain financial sustainability without losing independence.

Samer Ghamroun, co-founder and current board member of The Legal Agenda, which focuses on promoting the independence of the judiciary and defending the rights of vulnerable groups, said that while religious equality is guaranteed in Lebanon, many other individual rights are sacrificed. “So religious equality coexists with social economic inequalities, huge social economical inquiries and lack of respect for individual rights,” Ghamroun said.

Yeh Jiunn-rong a professor at National Taiwan University, chair of the Tang Prize selection committee for the rule of law and moderator of the forum, expressed his gratitude for the organizations in sharing with Taiwan and the world their activisms and values. “Thank you very much to the representatives of these three laureates for the 2020 Tang Prize for Rule of Law,”.

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2016 Tang Prizes to Louise Arbour and US sinologist

June 22, 2016

 On 21 June 2016  it was announced that Louise Arbour, a Canadian lawyer and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was named the winner of the second Tang Prize in rule of law. The Tang Prize is awarded to Arbour “for her enduring contributions to international criminal justice and the protection of human rights, to promoting peace, justice and security at home and abroad, and to working within the law to expand the frontiers of freedom for all,”  Arbour, 69, was also the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR) between 1996 and 1999. In 1998, Arbour became the first prosecutor to get a conviction of genocide in an international tribunal, when the ICTR convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu, a mayor in Rwanda, of genocide. Tribunal defined rape as a means of perpetrating genocide — the first time that rape was considered an act of genocide by an international tribunal. The following year, as the chief prosecutor for the ICTY, Arbour again made history by indicting Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who became the first sitting head of state to be tried for war crimes by an international tribunal.

A Tang Prize award ceremony will be held Sept. 25 in Taipei. The laureate will receive a cash prize of US$1.23 million and a research grant of up to NT$10 million to be used within five years.

The biennial Tang Prize was established in 2012 by Taiwanese entrepreneur Samuel Yin to complement the Nobel Prize and to honor top researchers and leaders in four fields: sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, sinology and rule of law.

This year the Tang Prize in the category sinology also has a human rights component as the laureate is William Theodore de Bary, Professor Emeritus of Columbia University. Read the rest of this entry »

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