The 2024 Right Livelihood Laureates are soon arriving in Stockholm to be honoured on December 4th at our televised Award Presentation, available live around the world. But there is much more than that happening during their stay in town!
From meetings with diplomats and civil society organisations to in-depth interviews with global media, we redouble our efforts to make their work more impactful. Programme Manager Stina Thanner shared with us about the most meaningful moments for Right Livelihood staff: the chance to get to know the Laureates during the most inspiring days of our annual work cycle and to lay the groundwork for a life-long relationship with each Laureate!
Right Livelihood: In a previous interview, we heard about the announcement of the new Laureates as the most impactful moment for Right Livelihood in terms of media attention worldwide. But we have another especially significant moment in the award cycle: the Laureates arriving in Stockholm to be celebrated. What is the “Award Week”?
Stina Thanner: The days around the Award Presentation are the Award Week. We invite Laureates to Stockholm a few days before the Award Presentation so they can meet the Right Livelihood team and any partners or actors that can be relevant for them.
The programme looks very different with every Laureate. Before the announcement, we talk to the Laureates about what they see would be most beneficial for them when they come to Stockholm. We work from there until they come to Stockholm a few days before the Award Presentation and ensure they have a programme that benefits them. We don’t want a week with a lot of panel discussions and meetings – and then no follow-up after that. We want it to be impactful.
RL: Are these all behind-the-scenes activities? Or is there a chance for the public to interact with the Laureates as well?
ST: We do one public event per Laureate: a filmed interview. It’s the opportunity for the Laureates to sit down calmly and discuss their work, the impact of their work, and the methods and strategies they have used to be where they are. We have a small audience at the moment of the interview. Then it is broadcast on the public service TV in Sweden, Free Speech TV in the US, and also on our YouTube channel for media or individuals.
Apart from that, what we want to do with the days around the Award Presentation is to get to know the Laureates and ensure they get to know us. Of course, the Award Presentation is also open to the public: it is a moment to celebrate the Laureates with a bigger, nicer production.
RL: In past years, the “Award Week” had other meanings and ran even longer!
ST: Yes. In the past, the Award Week was a European tour with all Laureates. They came to Stockholm, where we had a programme and the Award Presentation, but they also went to Geneva, where they had another programme and a second celebration. Besides, some went to Berlin and some went to Brussels. We saw that it was very tiring for the Laureates and the staff as well.
Then, when the COVID pandemic hit, we couldn’t do anything; we couldn’t travel around, and we couldn’t even have all the Laureates in Stockholm for the Award Presentation. So that was a good time to stop, reset, and think again. It was an opportunity to revise what we wanted, focus on fewer days in one city only, and then start building the relationship that the Right Livelihood staff will have with the Laureates for the future.
RL: What happens with the Laureates who cannot travel to Stockholm?
ST: We’ve had people who weren’t able to make it because they were in prison or they had a travel ban on them. So it’s different depending on the Laureate. We usually know when a Laureate can’t make it. If the Laureates are free to speak with us and not in prison, we always talk to them and check their preferences.
So, for instance, 2017 Laureate Khadija Ismayilova was represented by a fellow Azerbaijani friend who worked in the same field. And then we had her sister, a fantastic singer, who also represented her. It’s common, unfortunately, for human rights defenders to be unable to travel. So we must highlight that and continue to highlight their work. We can’t forget about them; we need to talk about them. We try that as much as we can.
RL: Do you recall any other similar case?
ST: Another example would be the three Saudi Laureates from 2018, who were all in prison. Al-Qahtani’s wife and son came to join us. I think his son at that time was 18, and he had a fabulous speech, so emotional and so loving, where he was talking to his father and about his father and his work and the importance of talking about him and his fellow Laureates that were also in prison. That was very moving.
Another example is, of course, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who, in 2020, could not leave Iran. Then, we did a campaign that is still ongoing: #StandUp4Nasrin. We involved German and Swedish politicians in writing and recording statements. We called for her immediate release and freedom. And then, because it was 2020, the only Laureate who made it to the Award Presentation was Ales Bialiatski, which was also a surprise because we didn’t expect him to come either. In his speech, he was talking about Nasrin, and he was talking about when he was in prison, and how he still had nightmares about his time in prison. And a heartfelt message to the international community to stand in solidarity with her and other human rights defenders in prison. Then he went back to Belarus, and a few months later, he was taken to jail again and has still not been released.
RL: What else do you do with the Laureate? Are there informal moments or conversations, funny anecdotes?
ST: We have a lot of informal meetings and talks with them, like the welcome dinner with all Laureates and the staff here at the Right Livelihood house in Stockholm. We just sit and talk and get to know each other.
Then we have staff with the Laureates almost all the time. Sometimes it is just sharing a taxi or walking from one venue to another. Sometimes hanging around in the hotel lobby. One year, the journalist who did the interviews brought dreidels, which is a Hanukkah game that you play. And we were sitting in the lobby on the day of the Award Presentation, everyone was just hanging out in the hotel, and we were playing Dreidel, and then Laureates and Board members and a lot of people came and asked what it was. We were playing dreidel together, on and off in the middle of meetings.
RL: For sure, you won’t lack anecdotes about Stockholm’s weather at the end of the year!
ST: There have been many, many, many stories revolving around the weather in Sweden because we invite people in November or December, which is usually very cold. If not snowing, very, very cold. It’s also very dark in Sweden at this time of the year, the sun sets around 3 pm. So that is always a challenge for Laureates, especially those coming from warmer climates. And we try to tell them; we repeat ourselves so much about the need to bring warm clothes or to tell us if they can’t so that we provide all that. But then, if you haven’t been in that kind of cold weather, it’s very difficult to explain, so we’ve had a lot of cold Laureates. Many, many of them have asked for extra radiators at their hotel, or they’re cold even inside. They’re always cold. We had one Laureate arriving in sandals, open-toed shoes. It was like minus 10. So we went to a secondhand store and bought him a big ski jacket and gloves. He never took them off. Not even inside.
One more anecdote about clothes! I was not working here yet in 2012, when Gene Sharp was awarded and lost his luggage on the way to Stockholm. So colleagues went around and struggled to buy him suits that fit him and could wear throughout the week and at the Award Presentation even.
There’s another big issue here: Sweden is cash-free. While in many countries, they still use a lot of cash, in Sweden, we don’t. It’s just not possible to pay with cash. So we also had Laureates out for dinner alone, and they couldn’t pay. So a colleague gave them her credit card, and they couldn’t pay either because they didn’t understand how it worked. They tried to put in the PIN code when they were supposed to put in the amount. So we had to run around and ensure the restaurant was paid.
RL: You deal with weather and money issues, what about the language?
ST: At all public and formal events, we always have translation. So we have that and then if they are not comfortable speaking English, we make sure that we have either a staff member that knows the language they’re speaking, or we have external contracts that help them. We also encourage Laureates to speak their native tongue. That put us in some last-minute changes sometimes, like in 2019, when we had Davi Kopenawa and Aminatou Haidar among that year’s Laureates. We were on a train ride between Zurich and Geneva and they were talking about what language they would speak because this was a year where the Switzerland trip was before the Stockholm trip. And Davi, who is from the Amazon rainforest, had said that he wanted to hold his speech in Portuguese. Ok, we prepared everything for that. But then, after talking to Aminatou, who is from Western Sahara and would hold her speech in Arabic, not in French or Spanish, he agreed with her that Portuguese was the coloniser’s language. So he decided a few days before the presentation that he wanted to hold it in his native tongue, in his people’s language, which is very, very nice and something we, of course, encourage. But, from a production point of view, it is something we really want to know beforehand. Finally, thanks to some colleagues, we made sure that his speech was translated together with him and the subtitles were correct.
RL: The Award Week involves a lot of booking hotels and flights, dealing with documents, passports and visas. Are there also funny anecdotes around that?
ST: Oh, well, not that funny. Yes, there’s a lot of logistics involved. We make sure that we have good connections with Swedish embassies and home countries. So when we know who the Laureates are, and just a few hours before we announce the awards, we always reach out to the Swedish embassies in their countries to kind of build up that relationship if we haven’t had it before. So then we know that we can maybe have support from them if there are any visa issues. Sometimes the Laureates are under travel bans. Or the governments of their countries don’t want them to travel because they are afraid they won’t come back or they don’t want them to be recognised or the situation of their countries being exposed internationally. So we have our ways to try and get around it. But unfortunately, it’s mostly a very frustrating waiting game.
RL: That leads to Laureates’ security matters…
ST: Well, we have prep calls with the Laurates before the announcement, including a security call. We start working on that even before the announcement because, as Emoke [Bebiak, Head of Communications] said in a past interview, the announcement is a big media day and we know the risks that can come with that. So we do an assessment in advance, and then we continue working on that throughout the season because we don’t want to be contributing to worsening their security situation. On the contrary, we want to contribute to them being safer. So, are they comfortable being in photos or being highlighted at public events? Then once they are in Stockholm, we sit down with them again to plan how we can support them afterwards.
RL: How is the Award Week for you?
ST: Ever since I started working for Right Livelihood, I’ve worked on the Award Week. The first time was in 2017 as a trainee. In 2020, I was put in charge of it, and it’s been super fun because all the Laureates and staff from both offices are gathered. It’s very rare that we have many Laureates in one place at the same time. It is so special because we’ve read about them so much, we’ve started talking about them and to them for the last couple of months. And then when you get to meet them, it’s amazing! They’re always so kind and happy – cold, but happy and kind – and very, very easy, usually very easy to hop around. So it’s a lot of work and planning, and we are a pretty small team, and the expectations are high. I don’t get to spend maybe as much time with the Laureates as I would like because there’s a lot of running around and making sure that everything is done. I basically live at the venue where we have the longer interviews. My colleague Maike Hansen, Junior Programme Officer, is living at the hotel for that week to be able to answer questions that come up and make sure taxis are on time and so on. So it’s a lot of work but also super, super fun.
