Bianca
Jagger is an international human rights advocate and the former wife of rock star
Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. She has been a leading voice for social and
economic just and environmental protection for more than two decades through involvement
with numerous organizations, as an outspoken advocate and through hands-on, often
dramatic on the ground work. In 1981 while part of a US congressional fact-finding
mission at a UN refugee camp in Honduras, an El Salvadorian death squad abducted
40 refugees. Bianca Jagger and other members of the delegation chased the abductors
without weapons and fearlessly won the release of the captives. She was also involved
in helping to evacuate 22 children from war zones during the strife in Bosnia
in the 1990s and helped to document mass rape of Bosnian women by Serbian troops
and other ethnic cleansing atrocities. Her efforts and reports helped to convince
the international community to step in to stop the genocide.
In
2003 Bianca Jagger was named a Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador to help abolish
the death penalty; she is the Chair of the World Future Council, a group of 50
social change leaders who work to address some of the world's biggest problems,
and Chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation. She has been a goodwill
ambassador for the Albert Schweitzer Institute and has worked with many other
organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Greenpeace.
Bianca Jagger has received numerous awards including the 1994 Earth Day International
Award from the United Nations, the 1998 American Civil Liberties Union Award,
the 2006 World Citizenship Award from The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and in
2004 she received the Right Livelihood Award (often called the Alternative Nobel
Prize) ”...for her dedicated commitment and campaigning for human rights, social
justice and environmental protection.”