University of Georgia Presents Delta Prize for Global Understanding

The University of Georgia and Delta Air Lines has presented the 2012 Delta Prize for Global Understanding to Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire is a Canadian senator and retired Canadian Army lieutenant-general.

“The Delta Prize board has once again selected a true hero in the fight for human rights. Sen. Dallaire’s work to keep children from being forced into military service is inspiring. He joins an esteemed group of Delta Prize recipients whose collective work has made the world a better place,” stated UGA President Michael F. Adams in a press release.

The prize consists of a sculpture, a $10,000 cash award and a $50,000 travel allowance from Delta for a nonprofit organization of the recipient's choice. The award was established in 1997 with an $890,000 endowment grant from the Delta Air Lines Foundation and administered by UGA.

Dallaire is the founder of the Child Soldiers Initiative which aims to eradicate the use of child soldiers, the subject of his most recent book "They Fight Like Soldiers; They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers."

“My main thrust right now is advancing the concept of stopping the recruitment of children as weapons of war by conducting in-the-field research in central Africa where their use and recruitment has not waned even though we have had the optional protocol on child rights in existence since the year 2000,” Dallaire said.

“There are injustices in the world that garner significant attention at the policy and public opinion level, although often it is too punctual to be fully effective. The engagement in attempting to attrite the arming of children due to the proliferation of small arms as well as the forcible recruitment and indoctrination of children below the age of 15 to use these weapons in civil wars around the world are overt demonstrations of our inability to recognize that all humans are equal and that those children are just as human as ours," stated Dallaire in a press release.