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Rudolf Vrba award |
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for the best film in the "You Have the Right to Know" category Sevdie Ahmetí (Kosovo) is the executive director of the Center for the Protection of Women and Children (CPWC) in Kosovo, which works as an advocate for the rights of women, children, and minorities. Among its many activities, the CPWC documents cases of domestic violence, operates a clinic for women dealing with reproductive health and domestic violence issues, and provides counseling and support to victims of domestic violence and their families. From 1999-2001, Sevdie Ahmetí served as a member of the Kosovo Transitional Council. She has also served as a member of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms. During the NATO bombing campaign in Kosovo Sevdie was herself a victim at the hands of the Serbian paramilitaries. In 1999, she received the Human Rights Watch Award. |
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| Eliza Moussaeva (Chechnya) is the head of the regional branch of the human rights organization Memorial in Nazran, Ingushetia. Her office provides free legal consultations to Chechen refugees and monitors the legal and human rights situation in Chechnya. She is the author of several books on human rights in Chechnya, including Cleansing. Memorial is a movement that gained prominence during the years of Perestroika in the USSR during the 1980's. The main tasks of the organization are to record and preserve the memory of severe political persecution in the Soviet Union, as well to gather information about gross human rights violations in the territories of the former USSR. Eliza Moussaeva is trained as a psychologist and specializes in the psychological rehabilitation of victims of abuses. |  |
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| Jarmila Šenková (Czech Republic). Two families gave up on her due to uncontrollability and returned her back to the children’s home – in the end the third family decided to keep her. At the age of four a psychologist pinned a straightforward diagnosis on her: mentally retarded and uneducable. Despite this, she graduated from high school. After her foster father passed away she ended up on the street and decided to resolve her desperate situation by marriage. This was not the beginning of a happy life, but rather of an everyday hell – her husband tortured and humiliated her. Thirteen miserable years later she found the strength to leave him. However, the court wrongfully took her three children away from her. The only thing that she needs now to be with them again is an apartment. This is the condition set by the court, which finally vindicated Jarmila and declared her fit to take care of her children. This year Jarmila Šenková began work as a Romany field-worker in Náchod. She is assisting thousands of people in life situations similar to those she has experienced herself. |  |
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Ziba Mir-Hosseini (Iran) is an independent consultant, researcher
and writer on Middle Eastern issues, specializing in gender, family relations,
Islam, law and development. She is Senior Research Associate at London
Middle Eastern Institute, SOAS, University of London. In spring 2002 she
was Hauser Global Law Visiting Professor at the School of Law, New York
University. She is the author of Marriage on Trial:
A Study of Islamic Family Law in Iran and Morocco (I. B. Tauris,
1993) and Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in
Contemporary Iran (Princeton University Press 1999 & I. B.
Tauris, 2000), and co-director of two feature-length documentaries: Divorce
Iranian Style (1998) and Runaway (2001).
Who is Rudolf Vrba?
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Rudolf Vrba is a person of exceptional strength and courage. He was born
Walter Rosenberg in Topoľčany in Slovakia. At the age of 18, he was arrested
by the Nazis and spent two years at Majdanek and Auschwitz concentration
camps in Poland. In 1944 he escaped from Auschwitz together with his fellow
prisoner Alfred Wetzler. Immediately after their escape, while still in
hiding, they wrote down a detailed testimony of the mass extermination
of people in the camps. Their report belongs to the fundamental documents
of World War II and is kept today in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
in New York, in the Vatican archives, and at the Yad Vashem memorial in
Jerusalem. In autumn 1944 Walter Rosenberg joined a partisan guerilla unit and, under the code name Rudolf Vrba, fought against the Nazis until the liberation. After the war he studied chemistry at the Prague Technical University. He worked as a scientist and a university professor, writing more than fifty scientific books and articles. He also lectured and wrote several books about the Holocaust. He appeared as a witness at the trials of Nazi criminals and his wartime experience has been recorded in several documentaries, including Claude Lanzmann’s legendary Shoah. He described his wartime story in his own words in his book Escape from Auschwitz. It is the tale of a man who is able to confront his destiny under any circumstances, however hopeless they may seem. "Evil is committed by those who yield to evil in any way: whether actively or passively, whether as an instrument, an observer, or a victim. Under certain circumstances even ignorance is evil." – This is the message of an indomitable man, Rudolf Vrba.
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