Daily US Times: The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has won Sweden’s Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020.
Organisers said the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was honoured for promoting “peaceful civil disobedience against police brutality and racial violence” across the globe.
They noted that about 20 million people had taken part in BLM protests in the US alone, along with millions more around the world.
An online prize-giving ceremony is due to take place in Sweden’s capital Stockholm on Saturday.
The $100,000 annual prize commemorates Olof Palme, the prominent human rights advocate and Swedish prime minister who was assassinated in Stockholm in 1986.
Founded in the United States in 2013, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement was became an international slogan last year following several high-profile cases of police brutality against African-Americans.
Massive protests that followed the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others saw chapters of Black Lives Matter spread across the US and the world.
Olof Palme prize organizers said: “This illustrates that racism and racist violence is not just a problem in American society, but a global problem.”
They said the foundation had “in a unique way exposed the hardship, pain, and wrath of the African-American minority at not being valued equal to people of a different colour”.
Petter Eide, a Norwegian MP, has nominated the BLM foundation for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr Eide said in his nomination papers, the BLM movement had become an “important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice”.
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