On Wednesday, Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland will award the Council of Europe Raoul Wallenberg Prize for extraordinary humanitarian achievements. The award ceremony will take place at the Palais de l’Europe in Strasbourg at 1.pm on 17 January (Ante-Room of the Committee of Ministers).
17 January is the date when Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish diplomat who used his status to save tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, was arrested in Budapest in 1945.
To keep the memory of the courageous person and his outstanding achievements alive, the Council of Europe at the initiative of the Swedish Government and the Hungarian Parliament, has instituted in 2012 the Raoul Wallenberg Prize.
The laureate is selected by a jury of six independent persons with recognized moral standing in the field of human rights and humanitarian work, and appointed by: the Secretary General of the Council of Europe, the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the municipality of Budapest, the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Lund, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Raoul Wallenberg family.
Since 2014, the Prize consisting of a sum of €10 000 awards every two years the exceptional humanitarian achievements of a single individual, a group of individuals or an organisation.
This will be the third time the Raoul Wallenberg Prize is awarded. Elmas Arus, a young Roma film director from Turkey, received the prize in 2014, and the second laureate in 2016 was the Greek association Agkalia, from the island of Lesvos, that provided frontline assistance to thousands of refugees arriving to Europe.
The winner of this year’s Prize has been chosen on 4 December 2017 and will be announced on 17 January 2018.
The award ceremony is fully open to the media.
Contact : Tatiana Baeva, Spokesperson/Media officer, Tel. +33 3 88 41 21 41
