In a century often celebrated for bringing freedom from poverty and ignorance to billions—thanks to new technology, better education, and political reform—multitudes of people around the world still languish in prison for their political beliefs.

Many of them can be found in Myanmar (formerly Burma). Since 1962, except for a ten-year interlude from 2011 to 2021, a military regime has controlled the country. That rule has resulted in the systematic suppression of political and human rights, economic disaster, a civil war, and a humanitarian crisis. Since February 2021, when the military took power back from a civilian government in a coup, over 30,000 Burmese have been arrested, half of whom remain in prison. Estimates of people killed by the junta vary from just over 8,000 to as high as 100,000.

The plight of those prisoners—and of the families and the society around them—was painfully familiar to Bo Kyi. As a young student just about to graduate in 1988 at the Rangoon Arts and Sciences University, Bo Kyi watched his fellow students killed by the regime. He was soon swept up in the pro-democracy demonstrations that climaxed on August 8, 1988—thus the “8888” name for that protest movement. Bo Kyi plunged into working for the resistance. Soon, like many others, he was arrested and imprisoned—not once, but twice.

Altogether, Bo Kyi spent a total of seven years in prison. Not allowed to have books, he taught himself English in secret—writing sentences on the concrete floor with a shard of brick, learning from a professor held in the next cell, and even eating dictionary pages to hide them from the guards. Between detentions, the military tried to recruit him as an informer. He answered by demanding the release of all political prisoners and dialogue with Aung San Suu Kyi; when they refused, so did he—and went back to prison rather than send others there.

Soon after his release for the first time in 1993, alongside fellow former political prisoners, he raised money to support colleagues still behind bars and their families. He was jailed again, and after his second release in 1998, he fled across the Thai border to Mae Sot. There, in March 2000, Bo Kyi and his fellow former political prisoners organized the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP). Its founding principle is simple, clear, and unwavering: “As long as political prisoners exist inside Burma, Burma will not be free.”

Sustained by a wide network of volunteers, families, lawyers, and former prisoners, AAPP devoted itself to documenting political imprisonment, supporting detainees and their families, and ensuring the continued visibility of the junta’s political prisoners in Myanmar and around the world. It saw the release of political prisoners not simply as a humanitarian imperative, but a necessary step toward restoring democracy, reconciliation, and lasting stability in Myanmar, as well as connecting the realities of political imprisonment in Myanmar to the global struggle for freedom, justice, and accountability.

Working with both great care and courage, AAPP has brought thousands of forgotten names and faces out of the darkness.

Bo Kyi and his fellow activists know that there are wounds deeper than those inflicted on the body. The slow destruction of the human spirit is often the cruelest form of imprisonment. By drawing attention to prisoners of conscience and by preserving their stories, he has helped restore their personhood and reclaim their future, while ensuring that their suffering and sacrifice have not been in vain.

In electing Bo Kyi  to receive the 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the Board of Trustees recognizes and honors his life’s work as a steadfast pursuit of truth, accountability, and justice. His enduring commitment reflects extraordinary moral courage, personal sacrifice, and an unwavering belief that democracy and human dignity are always worth defending—and that even in the face of oppression, the truth must be told, justice must be pursued, and the freedom to believe must be upheld and defended at all costs.

Formed on the vast delta of three great rivers, Bangladesh has been called a country built on water, silt, and resilience. Its fertile soil has sustained civilization for thousands of years, and its people have fought adversity to sustain a growing economy. But the same geography that feeds it is also its main threat. Rising sea levels and intense river flooding regularly bring misery to its people.

While Bangladesh’s economy experienced a surge in the early 2000s, largely from garments exports, it remains highly challenged by climate change and political instability. Its population density is among the world’s highest, driving people to find work and shelter in the margins.

Among the most vulnerable and poorest Bangladeshis are those who live on chars—temporary islands and sandbars formed by river silt—whose lives and livelihood literally depend on shifting sand. At least one in twenty Bangladeshis live this way—largely neglected and ignored, with very little access to social services.

In 1997, a woman from one of Bangladesh’s most privileged families visited a char on the Brahmaputra River, and was deeply moved by what she saw. After studying the char dwellers’ needs more thoroughly, she opened a hospital ship for them in 2002. But after realizing that she needed help if she wanted to do more, she started an organization that same year that would prove crucial to the future of char communities. Simply named Friendship Bangladesh, it would save countless lives, help char people deal with climate change, educate their children, empower women, create livelihood opportunities, and bring social justice to the excluded.

That woman was Runa Khan, born in 1958 into abundance and exemption from the usual lot that awaited her countrymen. Leaving her sheltered world, she immersed herself into the life of the poor, starting as a teacher to young children in 1979. But it was when Khan encountered the people of the char that she found her true calling. Seeing that not one NGO was devoted to their needs, Friendship built a machinery of hope and service that continues to make a vital difference in the lives of millions. From a starting team of 24 field medical and hospital staff and four in the head office, the organization today employs more than 7,500 people, most of them drawn from the very communities it serves.

Since its founding, Friendship has established a three-tier health system that provides sustained healthcare at all levels from primary to specialist care. “Healthcare cannot be a one-time intervention… After a hospital treats a patient, Friendship cannot simply ‘disappear,”’ Khan says. Working now with seven hospital ships and two land-based hospitals, 550 mobile clinics, and 700 trained Friendship Community Medic Aides, Friendship serves riverine, coastal, and refugee communities, including Rohingyas displaced from Myanmar. Its climate adaptation operations has built the first solar villages and has afforested more than 200 mangrove hectares, training more than 10,000 volunteers in rescue and relief. More than 205,000 people have found new jobs through 137 Sustainable Economic Development Hubs.

On the principle of making “movable schools for climate migrants,” Friendship has built prefabricated schools that can be dismantled in hours and rebuilt when erosion threatens. Almost 30,000 students have been reached by these schools, and they have scored an astounding high school average of 90.05% in the Secondary School Certificate national examinations. Community paralegals educate people about their rights, and cultural workers ensure the preservation of traditional skills and practices.

Through these efforts, Runa Khan and Friendship brought the char people from inaccessibility to sustained service, from dependency to participation, from vulnerability to resilience, from invisibility to recognition, and from despair to hope.

Though she could have transformed lives from a distance, Khan chose instead to walk alongside those with the least—and in attending to the smallest details, learning that dignity is often restored one thoughtful act at a time.

In electing Runa Khan to receive the 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her profound empathy for the poorest of the poor in her country, and her courage, vision, and tenacity in building and leading Friendship to accomplish her mission. In her hands, privilege became not an entitlement, but a responsibility; not a family legacy to protect, but a gift to be shared so that others, too, might have the chance to live with hope, opportunity, and dignity.

In a world deeply fractured by power and politics, ruled by large nations with formidable arsenals of munitions and money, the voices of reason and justice are often left unheard if not silenced outright.

It takes great skill, wisdom, courage, and perseverance to ensure that the interests of smaller nations are represented and recognized on the global stage, for peace and progress to prevail over conflict and suffering.

Few statesmen have manifested these qualities better than Tommy Koh—a law professor from National University of Singapore (NUS) who applied his training and his values to diplomacy, showing the world that justice can prevail over power, and that even the smallest nations—and especially those communities whose lives depend on the sea—have rights that deserve to be respected.

Born in 1937 and educated as a lawyer and a legal scholar, Koh witnessed Singapore’s transition from British colonial rule, through its integration with Malaysia, to independence. In 1968, he entered his country’s foreign service as its youngest ambassador, representing Singapore at the United Nations. This would give him the exposure to global affairs that would serve him and his country and region well in the decades ahead.

In 1978, he chaired a pivotal negotiating committee of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, bridging a fundamental divide over seabed mining between wealthy and developing, capitalist and non-capitalist, maritime and landlocked nations. In 1982, as president of the entire conference, he led more than 150 nations to adopt the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Of enormous significance to maritime countries, this “constitution for the oceans” defined territorial waters and the economic rights of countries to their coastal waters and provides mechanisms for settling disputes. He also chaired the Earth Summit in 1992. In 1993, the UN appointed him as its Special Envoy to make peace between Russia and its three Baltic neighbors—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

But for Koh, his work at home was always just as important. Ever the academic, he mentored a new generation of Singaporean leaders through the NUS Centre for International Law of which he was the founding chairman in 2009 and the NUS Tembusu College of which he was the founding rector in 2011. As long-time director of the Institute of Policy Studies, Koh maintained a trusted bridge between government and civil society. He has been a strong advocate for the arts and heritage in Singapore, as founding chairman of its National Arts Council (1991-1996) and chairman of the National Heritage Board. He has quietly pursued humanitarian initiatives in support of the disabled and handicapped and of animal welfare.

What emerges is a portrait of a committed humanist navigating a global ocean gravely threatened by forces inimical to the human spirit, yet speaking to power with the calm conviction of moral authority. Though Singapore is a country of means, he has shown that adversity is not the burden of the poor alone. Beyond serving Singapore, he has represented the globally vulnerable and dispossessed, securing recognition and respect for their rights and advancing a more equitable international order.

Building more than treaties and institutions, Koh has shaped generations of leaders, scholars, and public servants, leaving a legacy that extends through universities, policy institutes, museums, and the countless lives mentored.

Through all this, he has found the courage to speak out for the right and just. “The test of a country’s adherence to principle is when it is inconvenient to do so… This is why we must put our adherence to principle over friendship,” he once said of an act of war staged by one of Singapore’s staunchest allies. Even at home, he has championed freedom of expression, remarking that “Singapore does not need sycophants. It needs loving critics.”

His greatness of spirit lies in his unwavering commitment to the common good, his deep sense of duty to his country, his moral consistency in choosing law over power, dialogue over coercion, consensus over confrontation, institutions over personalities, and mentorship over self-promotion. In the end, his greatest achievement is not simply what he built, but how he built it. Character was always his most enduring instrument of leadership.

In electing Tommy Koh to receive the 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes his exemplary leadership in international diplomacy and in the formation of a new generation of advocates devoted to the advancement of justice and human dignity the world over. Through his steadfast faith in dialogue, the rule of law, and international cooperation, he has helped make peaceful coexistence possible in a world of unequal power.