BIANCA JAGGER
Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador, Human Rights Advocate

Bianca Jagger was born in 1950 in Nicaragua, and at the age of 16 she won a scholarship to study at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. During her childhood and adolescence she witnessed first hand the terror of Somoza's National Guard. Her early experiences had a profound effect on her life and inspired her to campaign for human rights, social and economic justice throughout the world. Over the years she has received international attention as both a passionate and effective campaigner.

She has been on many fact-finding missions which have taken her to Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, to remote rainforests in Brazil and Ecuador, to Bosnia, Kosovo, Zambia, Afghanistan, Iraq, India and Pakistan. Ms Jagger has championed the causes of a wide range of marginalised groups throughout the world. In the 1990s she also spoke out on behalf of indigenous Populations rights in Latin America, and to save the tropical rainforests where they live, campaigning on behalf of the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua against the government's granting of a logging concession to a Taiwanese company which would have endangered their habitat on the Atlantic Coast; helping demarcate the ancestral lands of the Yanomami people in Brazil against an invasion of gold miners; and working with other rainforest groups against the threatened clearance of about 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforests for soybean plantations for international export.

In 1996, she was given the Abolitionist of the Year Award by the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in the USA. In November of that same year, Ms Jagger received a Champion of Justice Award as a “steadfast and eloquent advocate for the elimination of the death penalty in America” . Her articles, lectures and press conferences on the subject continue to challenge a penal system that is unfair, arbitrary and capricious, and jurisprudence fraught with racial discrimination and judicial bias.

In 2004 she was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the Fight Against the Death Penalty by the Council of Europe. Jagger has also been a goodwill ambassador for the Albert Schweizer Institute and has worked for Amnesty International on their, "Stop Violence Against Women", "Torture" and "Death Penalty Campaigns". She spoke at the anti war rallies in London in spring 2003. In 2004 Jagger added her name to the international campaign seeking compensation from ChevronTexaco for gross environmental damage in the Ecuadorian Amazon.