Gebru, Haider, Rural Women's Assembly and GYLA win 2026 Right Livelihood Award

The Right Livelihood Foundation, based in Sweden, announced its 2026 award on Wednesday 30 September, in a prize often called the "alternative Nobel". 1 2 The laureates are US AI researcher Timnit Gebru, Pakistani lawyer Jalila Haider, the Rural Women's Assembly and the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA). 3 2 Deutsche Welle reported that the winners were chosen from 200 nominations from 72 countries. 2

The jury honoured Gebru for challenging concentrated power in AI; she founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) after leaving Google. 1 According to the jury, Google fired her in 2020 after she would not retract a paper on risks of large language models, or remove her name, without certain guarantees. 1 2 Haider was honoured as the first female lawyer from her Hazara community, for challenging ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution. 1 3

Gulf News, citing Right Livelihood, said her law firm has handled more than 7,000 cases, and that she has faced detention, death threats and twice been placed on Pakistan's Exit Control List. 3 The Rural Women's Assembly, representing more than 178,000 small-scale farmers in 11 Southern African countries, was cited for defending land, seed and bodily autonomy. 1 2 GYLA, founded in 1994, was honoured for safeguarding Georgian democracy in the face of an autocratic crackdown. 1

The award was set up in 1980 by Jakob von Uexkull after the Nobel Foundation declined to create prizes for environment and development; the laureates will be honoured in Stockholm on 1 December. 3 1