Quetta Lawyer Jalila Haider Wins 2026 Right Livelihood Award

A Quetta-based human rights lawyer has become the latest Pakistani to win international recognition for work carried out under threat at home: the Right Livelihood Foundation named Jalila Haider among its four 2026 laureates on September 30, citing her legal defence of persecuted and marginalised communities in Balochistan.

Who Jalila Haider is

Haider is the first woman from Pakistan's Hazara community to practise law, and has spent years providing pro bono legal defence to minorities, refugees, transgender people, political activists and fellow human rights defenders across Balochistan. Her law firm has handled more than 7,000 cases, according to the foundation's citation. She first became widely known in 2018, when she led a hunger strike in Quetta protesting targeted killings of the Hazara community — a campaign that drew national attention to a wave of sectarian violence against Hazara Shias in the city.

What the award recognises

The Right Livelihood Foundation, a Stockholm-based organisation whose annual prize is commonly described as the "Alternative Nobel," said Haider had continued her advocacy despite detention, cyber-harassment and death threats. The foundation named three other 2026 laureates alongside her: AI researcher Timnit Gebru, the Rural Women's Assembly, and Georgia's Young Lawyers' Association — a group the foundation said reflects this year's laureates' shared focus on challenging authoritarianism, patriarchy and algorithmic bias. The formal award presentation is scheduled to take place in Stockholm later this year.

Why Balochistan is the backdrop

Haider's recognition lands against a year in which Balochistan's human rights record has repeatedly drawn international scrutiny. The province has featured heavily in this site's coverage of Pakistan's enforced-disappearances record before the UN, as well as broader reporting on gender-based violence and victim-blaming in Pakistan and the killings of transgender women in Karachi — precisely the overlapping categories of clients Haider's firm has represented. Her award gives that pattern of coverage a specific, named face: a lawyer who has kept taking those cases inside Balochistan itself, rather than advocating for change from outside the province or the country.

The recognition Pakistan keeps producing, and the record it sits against

Haider's selection continues a pattern of international bodies singling out individual Pakistani rights defenders even as the underlying human rights conditions they work against persist largely unaddressed. She was previously honoured with the US State Department's International Women of Courage Award in 2020 and was included in the BBC's 100 Women list in 2019. That repeated international recognition sits uneasily alongside the continuing record it responds to: Pakistan's rights landscape this year has also included UN scrutiny of child marriage practices, a record the Right Livelihood Foundation's citation of Haider's "continued advocacy despite detention, cyber-harassment and death threats" implicitly underscores — the same hazards her work has run into for close to a decade without resolution.

What comes next

Haider's firm continues to operate out of Quetta, and the Right Livelihood Foundation has not indicated any change to her advocacy work following the announcement. The formal Stockholm ceremony will be the next public marker of the award, though the foundation's announcement itself has already renewed attention, inside Pakistan and beyond it, on the cases her firm is still carrying.

Build Better Pakistan's Rights Desk covers human rights advocacy and the conditions it responds to across Pakistan.