While the Black Lives Matter movement continues to be met with a range of reactions in the United States, it is being honored internationally for its work and for the promotion of peace and justice. In November, it will be awarded the 2017 Sydney peace prize. The movement was founded in 2013 by three black women—Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza—after George Zimmerman was acquitted for the killing of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida.
Western Australian Labor senator Pat Dodson, who was awarded the Sydney peace prize in 2008 for his advocacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, applauded the selection of Black Lives Matter as a movement that stood against “ignorance, hostility, discrimination, or racism”.
“This movement resonates around the globe and here in Australia, where we have become inured to the high incarceration rates and deaths in custody of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” Dodson said. “It’s as if their lives do not matter.”
The Sydney peace prize honors a nominee whose work promotes human rights and nonviolence. Its past recipients include Dodson, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and former Irish president Mary Robinson. The award, which is given out by Australia’s Sydney University, has been offered since 1988. It is typically awarded to an individual peacemaker, making this the first time in the award’s history that the prize will be given to a movement or group.
Last year’s recipient, Naomi Klein, said Cullors, Garza and Tometi “embody the core principle of the Sydney peace prize: that there will never be peace without real justice”.
“This is an inspired, bold and urgent choice – and it’s exactly what our moment of overlapping global crises demands,” Klein said.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2ryTg2r
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