Congratulations to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a leading author, intellectual, and defender of free speech and women’s rights, on receiving the 2026 UN Watch Moral Courage Award, presented in Geneva at our Gala Dinner on June 4th before a sold-out audience from around the world.
Full Speech:
I want to congratulate Abnousse Shalmani and Jasem Aljuraid. People ask me, what gives you hope? And listening to the two of them tonight I have an abundance of hope. I also want to congratulate Hillel on what I would say is one of the most effective organizations in the world. You have done so much with so little. Thank you so much.
A short walk from here, inside the Palais des Nations, regimes that jail journalists and torture teenagers sit on the Human Rights Council. Many deliver speeches on human dignity. For decades, that performance went unchallenged. Then Morris Abram came along and challenged it.
He founded UN Watch in 1993 on a single proposition to hold the United Nations to the principles it had written down for itself in 1945. Abram had served as a civil rights lawyer and as an ambassador in this city. He understood the building from the inside and he had seen the Charter’s finest clauses recited most loudly by the governments that violate them.
33 years later the proposition has proven its worth. In 2007, Hillel Neuer rose at the Human Rights Council and described the abuses its members preferred to ignore. The Chair announced that he would not thank the speaker. The resolutions from that session are forgotten. But that moment is not because Hillel did what every delegate in that room was paid not to do.
The work since has been patient and exact. The Council maintains a standing agenda item for one country the world’s only Jewish state. It has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than it has against every dictatorship and mass murderer on the planet combined.
While Damascus gassed its own people and Tehran hung its dissidents, the diplomats in that chamber spent their energy on the one democracy in the region that holds elections and answers to its own courts. UN Watch records every vote and publishes the tally so the obsession sits on the record where no one can deny it.
When the UN agencies entrusted with Palestinian refugees was found to employ men as we saw tonight who helped carry out the October 7th atrocities, UN Watch named them one by one and presented the evidence.
This organization allows the people tyrants want to silence to speak for themselves. That is people that you saw tonight: The freed prisoner, the writer driven into exile, the mother still searching for her son taken in the night and never returned home.
I have spoken when powerful people wanted me to stop and I know the cost. I grew up in a world that decided before I could read what a girl was allowed to say. I left it. I documented what I had seen.
The threats to both my reputation and my life followed me across continents and have not eased since. What lets a marked person keep talking almost never comes from the state, but from people who refuse to look away and from rooms like this one tonight where the safety of one person becomes the business of everyone present.
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.
UN Watch is proof that conscience need not die with the man who first acted on it. I accept this honor with deep gratitude and I thank you for your courage.
