On the evening of 10 June, KHRP attended a star-studded ceremony hosted by comedienne Jo Brand at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel for The Charity Awards 2010, the UK’s most prestigious non-profit sector awards event. KHRP was one of three organisations short-listed in the International Aid and Development category in recognition of the tireless work it does in helping to bring perpetrators of human rights abuse in the Kurdish regions to justice.
 
All nominees were shortlisted for ‘specific initiatives which have improved the delivery of their charitable objectives and which demonstrate outstanding examples of best practice from which other charities can learn.’ The annual awards, sponsored by the Charities Aid Foundation, The Leadership Trust and The Times, were organised this year by Charity Finance. KHRP’s nomination was based on our successful ‘procurement of the abolition of torture by all lawful means’ initiative in which we urged the Charity Commission to accept work aimed towards this end as a legitimate charitable activity. This has since enabled other UK charities to include this in their mandate, bringing justice to countless torture survivors in the Kurdish regions and globally. The initiative has also resulted in some noteworthy precedents as a result of KHRP strategic litigation at the European Court of Human Rights. Of particular importance here is the precedent set in the case of Aydin v Turkey which established rape, when used in times of conflict, as a recognised form of torture across all member states of the Council of Europe.

“It is both a great privilege and a source of great pride for KHRP to have been recognised and so highly-commended by The Charity Award judges,” said KHRP Chief Executive, Kerim Yildiz. “As expressed by the Award’s organiser, Daniel Phelan, by being short-listed KHRP ‘demonstrated that it is amongst the best-managed charities in the UK’. Accordingly, KHRP would like to thank everyone whose efforts over the years have made its successes possible.”

The distinguished panel of judges at this years event included John Low CBE, Chief Executive of the Charities Aid Foundation, Maeve Sherlock OBE, former Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, Dame Jo Williams, former Chief Executive of Mencap, Paul Winter, Chief Executive of The Leadership Trust, and Dame Mary Marsh, founding Director of the Clore Social Leadership Programme and former Chief Executive of the NSPCC. Celebrities in attendance at the event included Greta Scacchi, Lynda Bellingham, Jon Snow and Peter Bowles.