KAMPALA — Amnesty International to present 2019 Ambassador of Conscience Award to Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, honouring their activism and leadership on climate change
Amnesty International will present the Ambassador of Conscience Award, its highest honour for human rights work, to Greta Thunberg and other Fridays for Future climate activists worldwide on Monday 16 September 2019.
Greta will be awarded at a ceremony in Washington D.C., USA, while members of the Fridays for Future in Uganda will be awarded in Kampala’s Namirembe Guest House Parry’s Lounge from 12pm to 2pm.
Amnesty chose to give the 2019 award to Greta and the Fridays for Future activists for their efforts to raise awareness of the climate crisis.
Her decision to miss school every Friday starting in August 2018 to protest outside the Swedish parliament until it took more serious action to tackle the climate emergency kicked off the Fridays for Future movement, which has mobilised more than one million young people from all over the world.
“The climate emergency is the defining human rights issue for this generation of children. Its consequences will shape their lives in almost every way imaginable. The failure of most governments to act in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence is arguably the biggest inter-generational human rights violation in history,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Kumi Naidoo.
Previous awardees of Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience include Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, Harry Belafonte, Ai Weiwei, the Youth Groups of West and Central Africa, Angélique Kidjo, the Indigenous rights movement in Canada, Alicia Keys and Colin Kaepernick.
