Past Winners
As China’s Communist Party exerts ever greater control over Hong Kong, media entrepreneur and democracy leader Jimmy Lai has become a powerful symbol of the struggle for democratic rights and press freedom in the territory. In prison and denied bail, the outspoken critic of the Chinese government and advocate for democracy faces charges that could keep him in jail for the rest of his life.
The Innocence Project has fought to exonerate the wrongfully convicted and implement reforms designed to reduce the number of wrongful convictions and impose accountability on a system that regularly produces them. Since 1992, the Innocence Project has freed 232 people who were falsely convicted and collectively spent 3,555 years behind bars for crimes that they did not commit.
The Ladies in White (Damas de Blanco) have a simple message: The political prisoners of Cuba are our sons, brothers, and our husbands. Every Sunday, the Ladies in White gather, or attempt to gather, for Mass at Saint Rita de Casia Church in Havana, followed by a procession down Fifth Avenue. They wear white to symbolize the peaceful nature of their protest and wear a photograph of a loved one who is in prison. For this the authorities have constantly harassed and organized mob violence against them.
Flemming Rose sparked worldwide controversy when he commissioned and published 12 cartoons meant to depict the prophet Muhammad. The illustrations, intended to draw attention to the issue of self-censorship and the threat that intimidation poses to free speech, provoked deadly chaos in the Islamic world and put Rose in the center of a global debate about the limits to free speech in the 21st century.
Leszek Balcerowicz has been widely credited with the economic transformation of Poland. He liberalized the prices of most consumer goods and initiated sound fiscal and monetary measures designed to balance the budget and end hyperinflation.
Mao Yushi is one of China’s most outspoken and influential activists for individual rights and free markets. Before economic reform began in China in 1978, he had been an engineer and during his lifetime has faced severe punishment, exile, and near starvation for remarks critical of a command-based economy and society.
Akbar Ganji is an Iranian writer and journalist who spent 6 years in a Tehran prison for advocating a secular democracy and exposing government involvement in the assassination of individuals who opposed Iran’s theocratic regime.
Yon Goicoechea Lara is a pivotal force behind Venezuela’s non-violent pro-democracy Student Movement. The 23-year-old Venezuelan law student is a passionate opponent of the erosion of human and civil rights under the government of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and an organizer of massive student marches that have captured the world’s attention.
In only two years in office, he negotiated the withdrawal of Russian troops from Estonian soil and introduced the kroon, one of Eastern Europe’s most stable currencies. He also instituted a flat tax rate, a move which has been widely copied—even in Russia. Under Laar, Estonia removed price controls, discounted useless regulations, and saw the largest real per capita income of any of the former Communist states.
Beginning in his native Peru, de Soto has focused on a revolutionary concept that is having repercussions throughout the world’s poor countries: the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries. His decades of pioneering work, for presidents and in the streets on behalf of property rights for the poor, have led to global acclaim.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the most heartening trend in the world economy is the collapse of central planning and the global spread of markets. This has had profound implications both for prosperity and for the entrenchment of constitutional government. Peter Bauer, retired Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, both heralded and aided those triumphs, and his work has been vindicated by them.