by Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific

Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Asia and the Pacific extends our heartfelt Congratulations to Dr Irene Fernandez on winning the Rights Livelihood Award for 2005!

We are indeed proud that Irene has bagged the 2005 Right Livelihood Award, which is often referred to as the alternative Nobel prize. She was one of the 77 candidates from 39 countries on the confidential list of nominations this year - four from Africa, four from Middle East, 20 from Asia, one from Australia, 26 from Europe, 12 from Latin America and 10 from North America.

We agree whole-heartedly with the head of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, Kerstin Bennett, who told the media that she was especially pleased that Fernandez had won the prize. Kerstin said Irene was a very brave woman who has continued to work for poor workers even after she was sentenced to one year in prison.

As the chair of PAN AP since 1992, we share in her joys and in her struggles. Irene, is the fourth Malaysian to have won the award. According to the Swedish organisers of the award which announced this year’s prize winners recently, Irene was recognised for “her outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women and abuses of migrant and poor workers”.

She is also a Steering Council member of PAN Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP); and is co-convenor of PAN AP's Task Force on Women.

We, in PAN AP, share in her triumphs as her greatest achievement was her ability to put the rights agenda into visibility, not only with the government of Malaysia, but also regionally. It is really a recognition of our work with the communities.

As chair of the Pesticide Action Network since 1992, working for the elimination of pesticides and developing sustainable agriculture, one of the key areas was the inclusion of the gender dimension and perspective in sustainable agriculture, making visible the invisible women farmers of Asia. This in turn led to campaigns on health, against GMOs, and taking back control of seeds.

Irene Fernandez is an active campaigner for the rights of the poorest: migrant workers, farm workers, domestic workers, prostitutes and AIDS sufferers. She was instrumental in organising the first textile workers union and began programmes to create trade unions in the free trade zones. She also focused on the development of women leaders in the labour movement.

In 1976, she joined the Consumers Association of Penang (CAP) and worked on consumer education, launching the consumer clubs for secondary school children to teach them about basic needs, safety and protection of the environment. She also began a consumer programme for rural women, linked to a breast-feeding campaign and the Nestle boycott.

In 1986, she led campaigns to stop violence against women. Various women's groups mushroomed as a result of these campaigns. One was the All Women's Action Society, of which Fernandez was president for five years. It is now one of the strongest women's advocacy groups in Malaysia. The Domestic Violence Act, Sexual Harassment Code and changes to the laws related to rape are all a result of its work.

That same year, she was the founder member of the Asia Pacific Women Law and Development (APWLD). This regional organisation was designed to bring together women lawyers and activists to look at women's law across the Far East. She was director for more than 10 years.

Fernandez also founded the Tenaganita organisation, which she still runs, in 1991 in Kuala Lumpur. It campaigns for the rights of foreign workers, up to three million of whom are in Malaysia. Foreign workers have been lured into the country, as a deliberate policy of the Malaysian government and have played a critical role in the country's recent economic success, but many now find themselves suffering the most appalling abuses and are detained in camps as undesirables.

Previous Malaysian Right Livelihood laureates are Anwar Fazal (1982), then head of Consumer Interpol, Sahabat Alam Malaysia president Mohammed Idris (1988) and Harrison Ngau (1988), a former member of Parliament who was active in campaigning on behalf of the Penan people in saving Sarawak’s rainforests.

Fernandez shared the award, along with the prize money of SEK2 million (RM970,400), with four other recipients - Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (Canada) and Roy Sesana (Botswana).

.We are indeed grateful to her for saying that share of the prize money will go back to the community which she has long work for in the struggle for their rights. The Right Livelihood Awards, founded in 1980, are presented to the winners annually at the Swedish Parliament.