The City Council announced in its session of 23rd June, 2010 that it will give the Human Rights Prize of the City of Weimar 2010 to Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi of India. Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi has been working for 15 years for the rights and interests of the Dalits, primarily in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Extract from citation for City of Weimar Human Rights Prize
As the founder of the Peoples‘ Vigilance Committee on Human Rights ( PVCHR ), he strove to maintain and enforce the fundamental rights of vulnerable groups such as children, women , Dalits and indigenous minorities.
Dr. Raghuvanshi with his committee put in place structures that allow it to demand these basic rights. He also documented many kinds of human rights such as starvation, police torture, child labor, etc., and tried through cooperation with local human rights groups to care for the victims individually.
Because of their commitment to human rights are he, his family and associates face permanent hostility (including death threats ) from political opponents. Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi was proposed for this Award by the "Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom".
The city of Weimar has the honour to remember its special historical responsibility and remember all the nameless victims of dictatorships and tyrannies in the world, a human rights award.
Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. Weimar's cultural heritage is vast. It is most often recognised as the place where Germany's first democratic constitution was signed after the First World War, giving its name to the Weimar Republic period in German politics, of 1918–1933. However, the city was also the focal point of the German Enlightenment and was where writers Goethe and Schiller developed the literary movement of Weimar Classicism. The city was also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, with artists Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lyonel Feininger teaching in Weimar's Bauhaus School.
Previous Winners of the Weimar Human Rights Prize include Sonja Biserko of Serbia, Jestina Mukoko of Zimbabwe and Father Shay Cullen from the Philippines.
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