Salem State College Series

Bianca Jagger
One Person Can Make a Difference

Tuesday
April 11, 2006
8:00 p.m.

A strong advocate for both human rights and women's rights, Nicaraguan-born Bianca Jagger has campaigned for over 20 years to expose atrocities against civilian populations throughout the world.

As a child in Nicaragua, Jagger experienced first hand the harsh military rule of the Somoza dictatorship. At 16, she won a scholarship to the Institute of Political Science in Paris. During the Nicaraguan Revolution and the Contra War that followed, Bianca Jagger condemned human rights violations on all sides. In 1981, she served on a U.S. congressional fact-finding mission to a UN refugee camp in Honduras and throughout the '80s she continued to expose human rights violations throughout Central America.

In 1993, her work took her to the former Yugoslavia, where she worked to document the mass rapes and genocide of the Bosnians, testifying before the Helsinki Commission on Human Rights, the U.S. Congress and the British and European parliaments.

Bianca Jagger's humanitarian efforts extend to the fields of health care and the environment as well. In New York City, she was instrumental in establishing Iris House, an East Harlem facility to provide health and social services to women suffering from AIDS. In Central and South America she has worked tirelessly to save indigenous populations and protect the rain forests. For her efforts, she has received the United Nations Earth Day International Award in 1994 and the Green Globe Award from the Rain Forest Alliance in 1997.

In 2004, Bianca Jagger received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for her "longstanding commitment and dedicated campaigning over a wide range of issues of human rights, social justice and environmental protection, including the abolition of the death penalty, the prevention of child abuse, the rights of indigenous peoples to the environment that supports them and the prevention and healing of armed conflicts."