2024: Nnimmo Bassey is executive director of the Health of Mother Earth Foundation and a global environmental activist.
2023: Lucas Benitez is a farmworker advocate and the co-founder of the Florida-based labor and human rights organization the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.
2019: Safa Al Ahmad, a Saudi Arabian journalist and documentary filmmaker, has produced documentaries for the BBC and PBS about uprisings in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Yemen that reveal the human costs of deadly and complex regional conflicts.
2018: March For Our Lives and The B.R.A.V.E. (Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere) Youth Leaders are two-youth-led organizations fighting against gun violence both in their communities and across the country.
2017: Bryan Stevenson is a civil rights lawyer, social justice activist, criminal justice reform advocate, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.
2015: Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist, author, and activist who writes about politics, culture, and human rights in their homeland and elsewhere.
2014: Agnes Heller was a distinguished philosopher and Holocaust survivor who sought to understand the nature of ethics and morality in the modern world and the social and political systems within which evil can flourish.
2012: Maria Gunnoe is an environmental activist from West Virginia who works to protect Appalachian communities from mountaintop removal coal mining.
2011: Aung San Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has committed her life to the non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in Burma.
2010: Denis Mukwege, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is the director of Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo where he has treated thousands of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.
2009: Lydia Cacho is a courageous journalist, author, and activist who confronts corruption, human trafficking, and violence against women and children in Mexico.
2008: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, began his advocacy for peaceful reconciliation as a fearless and outspoken leader of nonviolent resistance to apartheid in South Africa.
2008: Sompop Jantraka has been a leader of efforts to prevent trafficking and sexual exploitation of children in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
2006: Sister Luise Radlmeier, a teacher in Kenya, provided food, shelter, education, healthcare, and safe transit to young Sudanese fleeing their nation’s civil strife.
2005: Paul Rusesabagina sheltered and protected over a thousand refugees in his hotel during the 1994 genocidal killings in Rwanda.
2004: Heinz Drossel resisted the Nazis as a young German army officer by releasing captured prisoners, refusing to follow orders from the SS, and helping Jewish families escape from the Holocaust.
2003: Bill Basch joined the Budapest resistance in 1942 and delivered food and passports to Jews sheltered in Raoul Wallenberg’s safe houses.
2002: Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is an Indian activist and a champion of human rights who has emancipated thousands of children from forced labor.
2001: Marcel Marceau smuggled Jewish children to safety in Switzerland during World War II and later incorporated this experience into his masterful artistry as a mime.
2000: Nina Lagergren worked tirelessly to learn of the fate of her brother, Raoul Wallenberg, and to educate children about the importance of dedication to humanitarian work.
1999: John Lewis was a leader in the struggle to end segregation. A civil rights advocate, he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma with Martin Luther King, Jr. and was a U.S. congressman.
1997: Simha Rotem took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis, guiding survivors to safety through the maze of the city’s underground sewer system.
1996: Marion Pritchard was a student at the University of Amsterdam when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. She rescued 150 Jews, many of them children, from deportation to the death camps.
1995: Per Anger was a Swedish diplomat, friend, and colleague of Raoul Wallenberg who worked closely with him to save the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest.
1994: Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama of Tibet, is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, spiritual leader, and head of the Tibetan government in exile. He is a world leader for nonviolence, human rights, and peace.
1994: Miep Gies sheltered Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II, and retrieved and saved Anne’s diary after the family was arrested.
1992: Helen Suzman was a longtime member of the South African parliament who worked tirelessly against apartheid and racial oppression.
1991: Jan Karski was a Polish resistance fighter who witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust and brought word of them to the Allies.
1990: Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was a survivor of Auschwitz who, as an educator and writer, was a passionate advocate for peace and human rights.