Ka Hsaw Wa

Biography

Ka Hsaw Wa is Co-founder and Executive Director of EarthRights International and a member of the Karen ethnic nationality from Myanmar (Burma). He received his M.A. from the School for International Training in Intercultural Leadership and Management. In 1988 after he was captured and tortured, he participated in the 1988 student uprising calling for human rights, democracy and an end to military rule. Afterwards, he traveled clandestinely to remote areas of Burma to interview witnesses and victims of human rights abuses and exposed these abuses to the international community.
In the course of this investigation, he realized that his people face another threat—that of transnational corporate investment aimed at exploiting Burma’s resources and learned that these abuses were all connected to the
exploitation of natural resources in the name of development. In response, Ka Hsaw Wa and two American lawyers founded ERI in 1995. Ka Hsaw Wa has received the Goldman Environmental Prize, the Reebok
Human Rights Award, the Conde Nast Environmental Award, the Sting and Trudie Styler Award for Human Rights and the Environment, and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership.