HÁWAR.help HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD

Zarifa Ghafari is an Afghan local politician. In 2018, at the age of 26, she was appointed mayor of Maidan Shahr, the capital of Afghanistan's Wardak province with a population of 35,000 - making her the youngest female mayor in Afghanistan. During her time in office, she narrowly escaped several attempts on her life. After the Taliban took power again in August 2021, she fled to Germany.

Jihan A. was born in 2004 in the Iraqi city of Sinjar and, together with other family members, fell into IS captivity for 10 months. In January 2016, the Yazidi woman was accepted as part of the special quota in Baden-Württemberg. Together with Marvin Jiyan Balletshofer and Zine Balletshofer, she wrote the book " Dankbarkeit - Die Schlimmste Zeit meines Lebens" (Gratitude - The Worst Time of My Life).

Theresa Breuer has been a reporter covering the Middle East since 2012. After stations in Israel, Cairo and Beirut, she has been living in Kabul, Afghanistan, since the beginning of 2018. She now films, photographs and writes for German- and English-language media and is the initiator of Kabul Luftbrücke e.V. Thanks to her efforts, more than 800 people have so far been brought out of the country and thus to safety.

The Yazidi Najlaa Matto was in IS captivity for over a year and was sold several times on slave markets. She lost 37 family members, including parents and siblings. She is the protagonist in the film "JIYAN - The Forgotten Victims of ISIS", in which she returns to the place where her martyrdom began.

Nusreta Sivac is a Bosnian activist and judge. She herself was a victim of the misogynistic weapon of war, rape, during the Kosovo war in the 1990s. Sivac brought her tormentors and many other perpetrators to court after the war and testified against them. To this day, she fights tirelessly for the crimes of the war to be named.