Prize jury 2021

Eva Biaudet, chair

Eva Biaudet is a well-known human rights activist and the former Minister of Health and Social Services of Finland, also responsible for gender equality issues. 

In May 2019, Biaudet started her sixth term in Finnish Parliament. She is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Grand Committee, which also handles EU affairs. She is a former Chair of the Finnish Parliament Network on Human Rights and the Network of Finnish Women Members of Parliament, and she currently leads the Advisory Board for International Human Rights, which operates in conjunction with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. She is also the chair of the Party Council of the Swedish People’s Party. Between her terms as an MP she served in Vienna as the OSCE Special Representative and Coordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe OSCE has 57 member states. After her time in Vienna, she continued to work on human rights issues as the Ombudsperson for Minorities and, later, Non-Discrimination Ombudsman.

She was the Swedish Peoples Party candidate in the 2012 presidential elections. Since 2015, she has served as President of the National Council of Women of Finland, an umbrella organisation for 60 women’s organisations. She is also active in many civil society organisations concerned with democracy and children’s rights and combating racism.

Bella Forsgrén

Forsgrén is a first-term Member of Parliament, representing the Greens in Finland. She is a member of the Constitutional Law Committee and the Employment and Equality Committee, and a large part of her work takes places in these Committees. In addition, Forsgrén is a deputy member of the Social Affairs and Health Committee and the Administration Committee.

Forsgrén also serves as a Parliamentary Trustee of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, the deputy chair of the Council for Gender Equality and a member of the parliamentary Social Security Committee. She chairs the Network of Female Members and LGBTI Network of Parliament. In 2021, Forsgrén also chairs the Peace Education Institute.

Dean Peacock

 

Dean Peacock is Director of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom's initiative to confront militarized masculinities, a multi-country project in partnership with the MenEngage Alliance.

He is also a Senior Fellow at Promundo, a visiting scholar at the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego, an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town's School of Public Health and an Ashoka Fellow. He is the co-founder and former Executive Director of Sonke Gender Justice, a multi-award winning South African NGO working across Africa to promote gender transformation, human rights and social justice.

Peacock has developed multiple violence and HIV prevention methodologies which have been identified as best practice and used globally. He has also been involved in groundbreaking strategic litigation, including for prison reform, to end corporal punishment in South Africa, and to address the gendered dimensions of silicosis in the gold mining industry. He has published widely on gender equality, health and human rights in many major news outlets and academic journals.

Matti Vanhanen

 

Matti Vanhanen is a former Finland’s Minister of Finance and a long-serving Member of Parliament for the Centre Party in Uusimaa. He is also Finland’s former Prime Minister and Speaker of Parliament. Vanhanen holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences.

Melanne Verveer

 

Ambassador Melanne Verveer is the executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown University, a founding partner of Seneca Point Global, a global women strategy firm, and a co-founder of Seneca Women.

She served as the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, and played a leadership role in the development of the U.S. Na-tional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security.

She was the Chair and Co-CEO of Vital Voices Global Partnership, and during the Clinton administration served as Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady. She led the effort to establish the President’s Interagency Council on Women, and was instrumental in the adoption of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.