Brazilian nun awarded UN refugee prize for work with migrants

BRASILIA, Brazil — 

A Brazilian nun who has helped refugees and migrants for 40 years connected Wednesday won the Nansen prize awarded each twelvemonth by the U.N. High Commission for Refugees for outstanding enactment to support internally displaced and stateless people.

Sister Rosita Milesi, 79, is simply a subordinate of the Catholic bid of the Scalabrini nuns, who are renowned for their work to refugees worldwide. Her parents were mediocre farmers from an Italian inheritance successful confederate Brazil, and she became a nun astatine 19.

As a lawyer, societal idiosyncratic and activist, Milesi championed the rights and dignity of refugees and migrants of antithetic nationalities successful Brazil for 4 decades.

The UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award was established successful 1954 successful grant of Norwegian humanitarian, scientist, explorer, and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen. UNHCR announced the grant successful Geneva.

Milesi joins a agelong database of distinguished planetary laureates, including erstwhile U.S. archetypal woman Eleanor Roosevelt, the archetypal idiosyncratic to person the grant erstwhile it was acceptable up successful 1954, the foundation Medecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and Germany's erstwhile chancellor Angela Merkel.

She is the 2nd Brazilian to person the award. Former Sao Paulo Archbishop Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns won the prize successful 1985.

Milesi leads the Migration and Human Rights Institute (IMDH) successful Brasilia, done which she has helped thousands of forced migrants and displaced radical entree indispensable services specified arsenic shelter, healthcare, acquisition and ineligible assistance.

She coordinates RedeMIR, a nationalist web of 60 organizations that operates passim Brazil, including successful distant borderline regions, to enactment refugees and migrants.

Her enactment has had a important interaction connected Brazil's ineligible landscape, including the shaping of its 1997 exile instrumentality and the 2017 migration law, which enshrined captious protections for displaced radical and reduced the hazard of statelessness, UNHCR said successful a statement.