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UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn receives Sean MacBride peace prize in Geneva

After his landmark speech to the United Nations in Geneva, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was awarded a highly prestigious international peace prize. The award ceremony was held  in the presence of the Mayor of Geneva and invited guests, including a UNI Global Union delegation led by General Secretary Philip Jennings, alongside the General Secretary of the ITUC, Sharan Burrow.

The International Peace Bureau awarded Jeremy Corbyn, the Sean MacBride Peace Prize which is given each year in memory of the Irish peace campaigner, a Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1974.

After the ceremony on Friday, UNI GS, Philip Jennings said, “It’s fitting that Jeremy Corbyn has been given this award, just two days before ICAN, the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons receives the Nobel Peace Prize.

On behalf of all our UK affiliates and all of our 20 million affiliates around the world we congratulate him. Peace and unions go hand-in-hand – they are as Reiner Braun, the head of the IPB, put it ‘two-sides of the same coin’. Jeremy Corbyn is a former union official and someone who has dedicated his political life to peace, and we salute him.

“We look forward to welcoming Jeremy to our World Congress next year in Liverpool.”

Corbyn was given the prestigious award for his ‘sustained and powerful political work for disarmament and peace’, and for looking for ‘alternatives to war’.

ITUC General Secretary, Sharan Burrow had the honour of delivering the introductory address for the UK Labour leader, saying that peace was in his DNA and that he offered a beacon of hope for working people trapped in low wage, insecure and often unsafe work or even modern slavery.

Burrow said, “Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge that the next Labour government is committed to supporting the efforts of the United Nations for a legally binding instrument on transnational corporations and human rights indeed deepens the possibility of a more just world.”

Jeremy Corbyn, in accepting the Award, reiterated the four major threats to a common humanity he had highlighted to the UN earlier that day: climate change; the refugee crisis, the ‘bomb first, think later’ approach to conflict; and the growing concentration of unaccountable wealth and power in the hands of a tiny corporate elite.

“We have a common responsibility and a common destiny. I urge all of you to do everything within your means to create a new reality in which the values of equality, humanity and peace are uppermost,” concluded Corbyn.

Political activist, philosopher, and historian Noam Chomsky was the other winner of this year’s Sean MacBride Award