Stockholm - The president of the Maldives was Wednesday named winner of the Anna Lindh Prize, a human rights award created in memory of the murdered Swedish foreign minister.
President Mohamed Nasheed was lauded for efforts to highlight how global warming will affect the inhabitants of the island chain in the Indian Ocean as well as his role in the Maldives' peaceful transition to democracy.
The jury was "pleased that President Nasheed has accepted this prize at a time when the world community must understand and draw conclusions from the effects of climate change," former Swedish foreign minister Jan Eliasson, chair of the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund, said.
"President Nasheed and the Maldivian people show us that climate change is an issue of existential dimension," Eliasson added.
With an average elevation of some 1.5 metres above sea level, the islands are under severe threat if sea levels rise as much as some projections suggest they will due to melting glaciers and polar ice.
Nasheed, 41, a former political prisoner who took office in 2008, said in a statement issued by the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund that "democracy and human rights in the Maldives were secured through a home-grown, grassroots movement."
"Similarly, it is through the participation of ordinary Maldivians that we have been highlighting and addressing the issues of climate change and its effects on human rights," he said.
The prize, worth 150,000 kronor (19,000 dollars), was created as a tribute to the late Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh, who was stabbed to death in September 2003. It is scheduled to be presented June 16, a few days before Lindh would have turned 52.
Previous Anna Lindh Prize winners include exiled Myanmar activist Khin Ohmar, who won the 2008 prize, and Colombian activist Leonor Zalabata Torres, who won the 2007 prize for campaigning for the rights of indigenous peoples in the South American nation.
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