YIHR KS Won The Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights 2026
Speech by Marigona Shabiu
Executive Director, Youth Initiative for Human Rights β Kosovo (YIHR KS)
Dear members of the Bruno Kreisky Foundation,
Dear Marijana,
Distinguished guests and friends,
It is a profound honour to receive this prize here in Vienna, a city with such a rich history of political thought, struggle and commitment to human rights.
We accept this recognition with gratitude, but also with a deep sense of responsibility. Because the struggles for democracy, dignity and freedom that this prize honours are not struggles of the past. They are unfolding around us, every day.
We accept this prize on behalf of everyone who refuses to accept injustice as inevitable. Everyone who refuses to surrender to fear or accept that the powerful can decide whose lives matter and whose freedom can be denied.
Human rights are not gifts from those in power. They are rights we must defend, together.
James Baldwin understood that knowing what is right is not enough. We must be prepared to act, even when acting comes at a cost.
We know the pressure to remain silent, to soften our words, to wait for a better moment. But when people are being oppressed, there is no neutral ground.
Silence is not neutrality. It is a political choice – and too often, it serves the powerful.
At the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Kosovo, and through our work with young people across the region, we refuse to make that choice.
We challenge political forces that demand amnesia, excuse violence, glorify perpetrators, and turn communities against one another. Because there can be no lasting peace without truth, no reconciliation without accountability, and no democracy when young people are denied the power to shape their own future.
We build solidarity across borders because nationalism depends on division. It needs enemies, inherited grievances, and generations taught to fear one another.
Our answer to nationalism is solidarity: the refusal to build one peopleβs freedom on another peopleβs humiliation.
Across our region, young people are challenging corruption, authoritarianism, and the betrayal of democratic promises. In Albania and elsewhere, they are demanding more than democracy as a slogan. They want institutions that serve the public, power that answers to the people, and a future not controlled by those who have failed them.
They are not asking for permission to shape their societies. They are demanding their right to do so.
And our principles must hold beyond our own region. They must hold when speaking out becomes politically inconvenient, when powerful governments demand silence, and when solidarity comes at a cost.
That is why we must speak plainly about Palestine. The genocide of Palestinians cannot be buried beneath diplomatic language or treated as a distant tragedy. The destruction of Palestinian lives, the dispossession of a people, and the denial of their freedom demand political responsibility and an end to complicity.
Human rights cannot be universal only when it is convenient. International law cannot apply only when it serves the powerful.
From Palestine to Sudan, from Ukraine to every place where people face violence, occupation, and oppression, we reject the idea that human dignity depends on nationality or political alliances.
If our commitment to human rights has exceptions determined by power, then it is not a commitment to human rights at all.
To the young people challenging injustice, documenting abuses, defending memory, and refusing to inherit hatred: we see you, we stand with you, and we will not abandon you.
Thank you again to the Bruno Kreisky Foundation for this honour, and to Mariana Grandits for nominating us.
We accept this prize with a commitment to continue the work – to confront power, defend human dignity, and build solidarity wherever it is needed.
Because the measure of our principles is not what we say when standing up for justice when it is easy. It is what we do when it is difficult.
Thank you.