President
Jimmy Carter
2007 recipient of the Ridenhour Courage Prize
For more than a quarter of a century, Jimmy Carter has leveraged
the prestige and influence he earned as the 39th President of the
United States to carry out his celebrated commitment to peace, human
rights, environmental quality, freedom, and democracy. As First
Citizen, Jimmy Carter has consistently defended the public interest
and acted on his passion for social justice. The Ridenhour judges
are honoring Jimmy Carter for the courage and leadership he has
displayed in speaking out on difficult and controversial questions
throughout his distinguished public career.
President Carter has promoted non-violent conflict resolution,
bringing opposing parties around the world to the negotiating table.
Through the Carter Center, which he founded in 1982, he has engaged
in mediation in countries ranging from Ethopia, Eritrea, North Korea,
Liberia, Haiti, and Bosnia, to Sudan, Uganda, and Venezuela. Also
under the auspices of the Carter Center, he has promoted free and
honest voting throughout the world, having led 67 election-monitoring
delegations to elections in the Americas, Africa, and Asia since
1989.
President Carter has also focused on “diseases that no one
else really cares about much, or knows about” that affect
“the poorest, most destitute, forgotten and needy people on
Earth.” One outcome: Guinea worm, a preventable parasitic
disease which causes worms, some up to three feet in length, to
emerge through painful blisters in the skin, is now on the verge
of being eradicated, largely through the work of the Carter Center.
He and his wife Rosalynn volunteer one week each year with Habitat
for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that helps needy people in
the United States and in other countries renovate and build homes
for themselves. Habitat’s Jimmy
Carter Work Projects, as the weeks are called, have resulted
in homes for more than 10,000 people around the world.
President Carter, 82, is University Distinguished Professor of
History at Emory University and author of 21 books, most recently
Our
Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis (2005) and Palestine
Peace Not Apartheid (2006). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace
Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful
solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human
rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
|
