The Dag Hammarskjöld Scholarship Fund for Journalists honored Academy Award winner Emma Thompson and presented its Inspiration Award to Helen Bamber, OBE at their annual gala UN luncheon on November 11. Both women have been active in campaigns against human trafficking.
2009 Journalism FellowsThe Fund brings journalists from developing nations to New York each autumn to cover the United Nations at its busiest. It is managed on a voluntary basis by UN-based correspondents, who raise funds to support it. Initiated in 1962, the Fund was established as a memorial to Dag Hammarskjöld, the second U.N. secretary-general, killed in a plane crash in September 1961. The 2009 journalism fellowship recipients are from Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, and the Philippines.
Emma Thompson, actress and activistEmma Thompson, an Oscar winning actress and writer is chair of the Helen Bamber Foundation. She is co-curator of an Interactive art installation - "Journey"- which uses seven transport containers to illustrate the brutal and harrowing experiences of women sold into the sex trade. "The thing you have to remember is that torture victims often lose their voice twice. First during the experience of torture itself and then when they experience people turning their heads because they don't want to hear the story,” she told the luncheon.
Ms. Thompson achieved fame in the United States in a series of literary adaptations, notably "Howards End" (1992), for which she won the best actress Academy Award and "Sense and Sensibility" (1995), which earned her the Oscar for best adapted screenplay. She is the only person ever to win both acting and screenplay Oscars. She has appeared in more than 25 films, at least 10 television dramas as well as a host of theatre productions. Ms Thompson starred most recently in “Brideshead Revisited” and “Last Chance Harvey” opposite Dustin Hoffman.
She said she understood that as an actor that "finding that silent scream... the trapping of a voice inside the body. The work (of Helen Bamber) is all about finding that voice and being able to release it so we can hear."
Evelyn Leopold presents Inspiration Award to Helen BamberHelen Bamber OBE is a psychotherapist who has worked tirelessly for survivors of human rights abuses since she helped survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of World War II. In 1961, Bamber joined Amnesty International shortly after its inception and became chairman of its first British group.
She established the Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture in 1985. Ten years later, at the age of 80, she founded the Helen Bamber Foundation to aid survivors of torture. The foundation provides medical consultation, therapeutic care, and practical support and conducts human rights campaigns. "The process of justice, however late, is very important," she said. “It's the story of hundreds and thousands of survivors who really have no voice and will be forgotten…I am a person who simply does a job. There is anger. There is grief and then there is the reward.“
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addressed the luncheon, presided over by Evelyn Leopold, chair of the Fund.
Previous recipients of the Inspiration Award were Ambassador Jan Eliasson, former Foreign Minister of Sweden; Sir Roger Moore, a veteran UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and Timothy E. Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation/Better World Fund.
