Oviedo (EFE).- The twenty-one members of the jury for the 2023 Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation have begun deliberations this Wednesday to choose tomorrow, Thursday, a winner among the thirty-six candidacies presented for this award, among which there are several applicants linked to climate change.
The court, made up of thirteen men and eight women and chaired by the head of the Spanish UNICEF Committee, Gustavo Suárez Pertierra, this year has incorporated the journalist and vice president of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Foundation, Charo Izquierdo, into the general secretary of the Cervantes Institute, Carmen Noguero, and the designer and architect Rodrigo García.
Speaking to journalists minutes before the deliberations began, the former director of the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Program, Pedro Alonso, highlighted the difficulties that the members of the jury will have to choose from a list of applicants some of the which address climate change and “access and rights” to sexual and reproductive health from “different approaches”.
Extraordinary and highly varied applications
The director of the National Transplant Organization (ONT), Beatriz Domínguez, has highlighted that there are “extraordinary” candidates and in “very varied” categories, for which reason she has predicted that the debate among the members of the court will be “constructive” and in He will address issues of “enormous social relevance.”
The former minister and Prince of Cooperation Award in 1999, Pedro Duque, has spoken along the same lines, stressing that the candidacies that compete this year are “very varied and with various award-winning nuances”.
For her part, the general secretary of the Cervantes Institute has indicated that for the first time she attends the deliberations with a “very open mind”, since it is an “ideal” award to which “very interesting” applicants and from very heterogeneous disciplines attend.
This award is intended to distinguish the individual or collective work of “development and promotion of public health, universality of education, protection and defense of the environment and the economic, cultural and social advancement of peoples”.
Awarded in past editions
Last year the prize went to the former British sailor Ellen MacArthur, a promoter of the circular economy since the foundation to which she gives her name, and in previous editions they have been distinguished, among others, by the Hispanic Society of America (HSA), the Framework Convention of the United Nations on Climate Change (UNFCC) and the Paris Agreement; Wikipedia; the Fulbright Foundation; the Max Planck society; Red Cross and Red Crescent; Al Gore; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Helmut Kohl; Mario Soares; Isaac Rabin and Yasser Arafat, or Frederick De Klerk and Nelson Mandela.
The one for International Cooperation will be the sixth of the eight awards convened annually by the Princess of Asturias Foundation to fail, after the one for the Arts has been awarded to the American actress Meryl Streep; the one for Communication and Humanities to the Italian philosopher Nuccio Ordine; that of Social Sciences to the French historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse; the one for Sports to the Kenyan athlete Eliud Kipchoge, and the one for Literature to the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
The Scientific and Technical Research (June 7) and the Concord (June 14) prizes will still be awarded. EFE