Author and public intellectual Ayaan Hirsi Ali received UN Watch’s 2026 Moral Courage Award on June 4 at the organization’s annual gala dinner in Geneva, Switzerland. Also honored was renowned French-Iranian journalist, author and filmmaker Abnousse Shalmani, recipient of UN Watch’s 2026 Per Ahlmark Award.
The gala also featured remarks by Kuwaiti dissident Jasem Aljuraid. The event drew a crowd of more than 300 diplomats, community leaders and supporters.
Ali, a renowned author and public intellectual, received UN Watch’s 2026 Moral Courage Award. Born in Somalia, she escaped a forced marriage, fleeing as a refugee to the Netherlands. She has built an international reputation for confronting difficult truths, earning recognition from TIME as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
A former member of the Dutch Parliament, she has spent decades defending free expression, in addition to the rights of women and girls, while confronting Islamist oppression, often at great personal risk. Her work challenges conventional thinking and continues to shape the global debate on freedom, faith and the rights of women.
Accepting the honor that evening, Ali said: “I value this award for the company it places me in. You gave it for work that draws danger, and you gave it with full knowledge of what that work involves because you take the same risks yourselves. No community recognizes the machinery of contempt more clearly than this one because no community has had more practice. You have watched it hide behind the language of law and resolution, and you refuse to grant the disguise the dignity it demands.”
Shalmani received UN Watch’s 2026 Per Ahlmark Award—named in honor of the late Swedish author, former deputy prime minister and human-rights advocate who co-founded UN Watch—for her courageous defense of freedom, secularism and human dignity in the face of fundamentalism and authoritarianism. Previous recipients of the award include Sophia Aram (2025), Hussein Aboubakr Mansour (2022) and Bari Weiss (2020).
Born in Tehran, she was forced into exile as a child and raised in Paris, where she immersed herself in history and literature before building a distinguished career as an author, journalist and filmmaker. Through her fearless voice, including regular appearances on French TV, Shalmani has become one of France’s leading critics of Islamism, antisemitism and tyranny, while tirelessly defending women’s rights, freedom of expression, secularism and democratic values.
“It is an immense honor to receive this award, and I can only try to live up to the pride it represents for me,” she said while accepting the award. “Forty-seven years of rupture imposed by the theocracy versus 2,600 years of shared history—from the day Cyrus the Great liberated the Jews from Babylon. That kinship was never extinguished. It will burst into the open the moment the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guards are gone.”
Aljuraid’s speech on behalf of UN Watch at the U.N. Human Rights Council in March went viral and was seen by millions around the world.
Addressing the audience, he said: “As long as UN Watch continues to shine a light on hypocrisy, defend the voices that dictators try to silence and give dissidents a platform when the world looks away, I will continue standing with you and speaking the truth, no matter the cost.”
Aljuraid is a Kuwaiti investigative journalist, political analyst and prominent dissident who became a political refugee in Canada after being sentenced in absentia to 12 years in prison.
The UN Watch gala dinner is an annual event in support of the organization’s efforts to hold the United Nations accountable to its founding principles of human rights, equality and justice.
