Roya Bormand (left) receives the Gawler T. Butcher Medal on April 4, 2024. (Photo offered by NED workers)
WASHINGTON, DC – On April 4, the American Society of International Law (ASIL) introduced Roya Borroumand, co-founder and govt director of the Abdulrahman Borroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, a accomplice of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), as was acknowledged with an award. She was awarded the 2024 Gawler T. Butcher Medal in recognition of her management and dedication to selling human rights and democracy in Iran.
“I’m honored and humbled to obtain the Gawler T. Butcher Medal, which acknowledges the contributions, exhausting work, compassion, and compassion of so many people of numerous nationalities, ethnicities, faiths, political persuasions, and backgrounds. “We imagine it is a recognition of the braveness and dedication of those two volunteers who’ve introduced this bold, first-of-its-kind mission to life,” Borrowman mentioned. “It can also be a tribute to the 1000’s of victims, survivors and witnesses in Iran and overseas who’ve come ahead to testify, with out whom such a large-scale commemoration and documentation wouldn’t be potential. It would have been.”
Loya, alongside along with her sister Radan Borroumand, a former Reagan Fassel Democracy Fellow at NED, has devoted her life to defending human rights in Iran. In 2002, they collectively based this heart. The heart was named in reminiscence of his late father, Abdulrahman Bormand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was assassinated in 1991. [Read more about the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center.]
In 2006, the middle launched Omid (that means “hope” in Farsi) as a web based platform to doc the Islamic Republic’s human rights violations and commemorate its victims. Omid has up to now collected 26,369 circumstances of arbitrary executions and extrajudicial killings by the regime.
Their work helped assist the trial of Hamid Nouri, who was convicted in 2022 of violating worldwide human rights regulation for his function within the regime’s mass killing of 1000’s of political prisoners in 1988. Ta.
More just lately, its in depth documentation and historic data has additionally been cited by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, with detailed findings revealed in its fifty fifth session in March 2024. Presented at UNHRC assembly. In Geneva.
“Roya and her group have labored rigorously and objectively to doc human rights abuses by the Iranian regime,” mentioned Amira Murthy, NED’s senior director of Middle East and North Africa applications. “The work of the Abdrahman Boroumand Center is an important useful resource for victims to hunt justice and to carry perpetrators accountable beneath worldwide regulation. We are proud to assist Loya and the Center of their pursuit.”
First awarded by ASIL in 1997, the Gawler T. Butcher Medal acknowledges distinguished people for excellent contributions to the event or efficient realization of worldwide human rights. The medal is known as for Gawler Thiel Butcher, a distinguished African-American scholar and professor of worldwide regulation at Howard University School of Law, who served as director of the U.S. Agency for International Development in Africa throughout the Carter administration. He served as Deputy Secretary of State and was a number one advocate of African coverage. Ending world starvation.