Swedish Right Livelihood Prize honors AI researcher and rights defenders — Deutsche Welle English

The Swedish Right Livelihood Prize for 2026 has honored artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru, Pakistani lawyer Jalila Haider, the Rural Women’s Assembly, and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association. The award recognizes work that contributes to creating a more just and peaceful world.

As Deutsche Welle reports, the laureates were selected from 200 nominations from 72 countries. The Right Livelihood Foundation said that the awardees confront systems that push people to the margins and insist that people remain at the center of attention.

Research into bias in AI

Timnit Gebru, the founder of the Distributed AI Research Institute, was awarded for researching how bias affects artificial intelligence systems. The foundation said she challenges the concentration of power in AI and develops digital technologies based on justice, lived experience, and human agency.

In 2020, Gebru was among the authors of a paper on the risks of bias in large language models while she co-led Google’s ethical AI team. According to the prize jury, Google dismissed the researcher after she refused to withdraw the paper or remove her name from it without receiving certain guarantees.

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Human rights work

Pakistani lawyer Jalila Haider was honored for countering ethnic, state, and patriarchal persecution. She defends vulnerable communities, including ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as refugees.

The Rural Women’s Assembly unites more than 178,000 small-scale farmers in 11 countries in Southern Africa. The organization protects land, seeds, and bodily autonomy, as well as reproduces and preserves local seed varieties.

The Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, founded in 1994, was awarded for its work to strengthen and protect Georgian democracy and support civic activism. The prize jury linked this activity to countering authoritarian pressure.

The Right Livelihood Prize was founded by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexküll in 1980. It recognizes achievements in environmental protection and international development that, according to the founder’s concept, had remained outside the focus of the Nobel Prizes.