Urmila Chaudhary of Nepal receives the 2024 Global Anti-Racism Championship Award

INN/Kathmandu, @Infodeaofficial

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken handed the Global Anti-Racism Championship Award 2024 to Nepal’s Urmila Chaudhary. Six civil society leaders are recognised with this award for their extraordinary bravery, vision, and dedication to promoting human rights, justice, and racial equity.

At the age of 17, Urmila Chaudhary, a labour activist and abolitionist, was freed from child labour. In order to empower former bonded workers, she organised 42 cooperatives and co-founded the Freed Kamlari Development Forum. In an effort to combat injustice even more, she is now pursuing a legal education. Urmila Chaudhary is awarded for her commitment to fighting systematic racism and intersectional abuses, as well as for promoting the rights of Nepal’s underprivileged castes and ethnic communities.

Girls and young women were sold by their parents into one-year contracts of indentured servitude to wealthy and higher-caste purchasers under the Kamalari system, which was used in Nepal’s Western Terai. The Supreme Court of Nepal upheld the illegality of the kamlari practice on September 10, 2006, and said that former kamlaris were entitled to government compensation, education, and rehabilitation.

However, the practice persisted since the 2006 Nepali interim government disregarded the Supreme Court’s decision. Mass demonstrations calling for the practice’s immediate cessation were held in response to the strange death of 12-year-old Srijana Chaudhary in March 2013. The Kamlari system was formally disbanded by the government in June 2013, and a 10-point plan encompassing justice, rehabilitation, and compensation for abuse victims was accepted.