Five laureates honoured at Four Freedoms Awards 2024

The Four Freedoms Awards 2024 go to the following individuals and organisations:

• The award for Freedom of Speech goes to research collective Bellingcat. The award will be presented to founder and director Eliot Higgins.

• The award for Freedom of Worship goes to Zumretay Arkin, who fights for the rights of Uyghurs.

• The award for Freedom from Want goes to Brazil’s Minister of Indigenous Peoples, Sônia Guajajara.

• The award for Freedom from Fear goes to Grace Forrest, founder of Walk Free. This human rights organisation focuses on the eradication of modern slavery

Earlier this month, it was announced that the Ukrainian organisation Save Ukraine will receive the International Four Freedoms Award 2024.

Freedom of Speech - Bellingcat

Research collective Bellingcat makes an effort to separate fact from fiction. In times when fake news creates a lot of uncertainty, factual and accurate information is crucial for a well-informed society. Bellingcat plays an important role in this: the foundation investigates international conflicts and has developed a distinctive approach to get closer, faster and in a more accurate way to the truth. Bellingcat does this with the support of a large network and countless volunteers, specialised in fact-checking and Open Source investigation. Bellingcat’s work is pioneering, meaningful and demonstrates a great sense of responsibility.

Freedom of Worship - Zumretay Arkin

Zumretay Arkin has been campaigning for years for the rights of Uyghurs, a people in western China. Arkin draws international attention to the suppression of religious freedom and violation of the Uyghur people’s human rights. She has founded a Uyghur friendship group for women worldwide and is working tirelessly to support Uyghur refugees. She is also a spokesperson for the World Uyghur Congress. She advocates for the protection and preservation of Uyghur culture, religion and language in international forums, including the United Nations. Arkin gives a voice to the voiceless.

Freedom from Want - Sônia Guajajara

Sônia Guajajara is Brazil’s first Minister for Indigenous Peoples, after a lifetime of indigenous activism. In her new position, Guajajara continues her fight for the recognition and protection of indigenous lands. Due to deforestation, expropriation or eviction of indigenous peoples, the habitat of indigenous peoples is shrinking, including in the Amazon. Climate change also threatens indigenous peoples’ habitats: forests are crucial for CO2 storage. This is why Guajajara is also taking up the fight against climate change. In this way, environmental policy goes hand in hand with the fight for indigenous peoples’ rights.

Freedom from Fear - Grace Forrest

Australian Grace Forrest is the Founder of Walk Free, an international human rights group focussed on the eradication of modern slavery in all its forms. Forrest has worked in the anti-slavery space for over a decade, and it is through her efforts that politicians, policymakers, and businesses are now provided with the Global Slavery Index, a dataset on measuring and understanding modern slavery. Alongside developing policy and research which has informed human rights legislation across the globe, Forrest has spent extensive time in the field working alongside community leaders and survivors to cement their lived experience as expertise. A crucial part of Walk Free’s work is highlighting the need for greater transparency in global supply chains to identify modern slavery, and empowering survivor leadership against modern slavery.

2024 Four Freedoms Awards ceremony

The Four Freedoms Awards ceremony will take place on Thursday 11 April 2024 at the Abbey in Middelburg. The medals will be presented by Dutch presenters. The programme and the names of these presenters will be announced later.

Moral compass

For over 40 years, the Four Freedoms Awards have been awarded to men, women and organisations whose efforts and achievements demonstrated a genuine commitment to the ideals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In 1941, in his historic Four Freedoms speech, President Roosevelt proclaimed that everyone, everywhere in the world, is entitled to four basic human rights: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. These words are still relevant today. They provide a moral compass for the design of our society and how we treat each other.

The Roosevelt Foundation and the Roosevelt Institute in New York want to inspire young and old to keep Roosevelt’s ideas alive. The award ceremony takes place in New York in the odd-numbered years and in Middelburg in the evennumbered years. Four Freedoms Awards have previously been presented to prominent world citizens such as

Harry S. Truman, H.R.H. Princess Juliana, Nelson Mandela, Arthur Miller, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Malala Yousafzai, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dr Angela Merkel.