The Board of Directors of the United Nations Association of New York invite you to celebrate
The 2019 United Nations Day
Humanitarian Awards Gala Dinner
Celebrating the 74th Anniversary of the United Nations
Thursday, October 3, 2019
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J. W. Marriott Essex House
160 Central Park South,
New York City
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Cocktail Hour | 6:30 p.m.
Dinner Program | 7:30 p.m.
Black Tie or National Dress
2 0 1 9 H O N O R E E S
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DELTA AIR LINES
Honoring Delta Air Lines for its leadership in the
fight against human trafficking and modern slavery
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MIRA SORVINO
Actor and Humanitarian
Honored for her commitment to
ending human trafficking
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L I F E T I M E A C H I E V E M E N T A W A R D
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Journalist and Writer
Honored for his journalism and dedication to
promoting awareness of human trafficking
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K E Y N O T E S P E A K E R
SIMONE MONASEBIAN
Chief
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
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M A S T E R O F C E R E M O N I E S
Richard Lui
Anchor, MSNBC
2019 HUMANITARIAN AWARD HONOREE
DELTA AIR LINES
Allison Ausband
Senior Vice President, In-Flight Service
An estimated 25 million victims are affected globally by human trafficking, and many of those victims are transported through air travel. Delta Air Lines has been a leading voice for advocates and airlines alike since 2011, when it became the first airline to sign the End Child Prostitution and Trafficking Code of Conduct.
Allison Ausband, Senior Vice President, In-Flight Service, has been at the helm of Delta’s efforts after being appointed by CEO Ed Bastian to spearhead the airline’s #GetOnBoard Campaign.
Under her leadership, Delta has trained 66,000 of its 80,000 employees to identify and report human trafficking at home, onboard or wherever their travels may take them. The airline also provided a $1M grant to support the National Human Trafficking Hotline in partnership with Polaris, and since has seen a 19% increase in calls.
Delta and its customers have donated over 2M miles to provide flights for human trafficking victims and survivors to receive care or safety. Delta also supports victims by lobbying for anti-trafficking legislation and offering survivor apprenticeships at its corporate headquarters, providing mentorship and career development skills.
Ausband has a personal and professional passion for fighting exploitation. As part of her unwavering commitment, Ausband was recently named to the National In-Flight Sexual Misconduct Task Force led by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the First Lady of Georgia’s “Georgians for Refuge, Action, Compassion, and Education” (GRACE) Commission.
2019 HUMANITARIAN AWARD HONOREE
MIRA SORVINO
Actor and Humanitarian
Academy award winning Actress and United Nations Goodwill ambassador Mira Sorvino first began expressing her passion for social justice at Harvard University, where she received two Ford Foundation grants to research her summa thesis on Racial Conflict between Chinese and African students in the PRC, which was awarded the coveted Hoopes Prize.
She was the official ambassador for Amnesty International's "Stop Violence Against Women" campaign from 2004 to 2008. Her work with Amnesty was recognized at the Artivist Film Festival. In March 2006, she was honored with Amnesty International's Artist of Conscience Award. She lobbied Capitol Hill on the topic of Human Trafficking and officially testified before Congress on the genocide in Darfur, Sudan.
In 2009 Sorvino was appointed to her current position as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s Goodwill Ambassador in the Global Fight Against Human Trafficking. She has traveled to Mexico and Spain to launch the UN’s Blue Heart Campaign to fight Human Trafficking, and to London and Bangkok, Thailand to promote the recently created UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Human Trafficking.
She has participated in public forums in Luxor, Egypt, at the Niemeyer Center in Aviles, Spain, Baku Azerbaijan, and in Washington D.C. In each locale, Sorvino works together with NGOs on the ground and members of government and law enforcement to better synthesize efforts to discover and protect victims of human trafficking, and to punish its perpetrators.
In Fall 2010 she was honored for her work by Save The Children, and in December 2010, the UN awarded her “Global Advocate of the Year.” She has participated in sessions to create the UN General Assembly’s Global Plan of Action to Combat Human Trafficking.
She has testified before the U.S. Senate on Human Trafficking, helped engender legislative change at the National Conference of State Legislators, spoken at the National Association of Attorneys General, the American Bar Association, the Mashable Social Good Summit, and the Deloitte Center to reform state laws on human trafficking and domestic minor victims of trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation, as well as speaking at Harvard, Delta Airlines, and in conferences in Sweden and Aruba.
Collaborating with the CNN Freedom project, she was the on-the-ground interviewer in the award-winning documentary “Everyday in Cambodia” on the crisis of virgin sales in Phnom Penh. She acted in the dramatic films on modern day slavery, “Human Trafficking” and “Trade of Innocents” and wrote the foreword to “Walking Prey” on the vulnerability of US youth to sex trafficking. She will be seen in 2020 in the 20th Century Fox feature “Sound of Freedom” opposite Jim Caviezel, which highlights the child trafficking victim rescue Operation Underground Railroad (OURescue).
In the fall of 2017 Sorvino was one of the first women to come forward about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker exposé. She has emerged as one of the most prominent voices of #MeToo and #TimesUp and has received several honors for her advocacy including from UCLA for both Human Trafficking and #MeToo.
Along with her husband, actor, director and screenwriter Christopher Backus, she is the mother of four children.
2019 UN DAY GALA DINNER LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
NICHOLAS KRISTOF
Journalist and writer
Nicholas Kristof has been a columnist for The New York Times since 2001. He grew up on a farm in Oregon, graduated from Harvard, studied law at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and then studied Arabic in Cairo. He was a longtime foreign correspondent for The New York Times and speaks various languages.
Mr. Kristof has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of Tiananmen Square and the genocide in Darfur, along with many humanitarian awards such as the Anne Frank Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
With his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, he has written several books, most recently A Path Appears (September 2014) about how to make a difference. Their previous book, Half the Sky, was a No. 1 best seller. His next book is expected in fall 2019.
Mr. Kristof, who has lived on four continents and traveled to more than 150 countries, was The New York Times’s first blogger and has millions of followers across social media platforms.
He enjoys running, backpacking and having his Chinese corrected by his children.
2019 GALA DINNER | KEYNOTE SPEAKER
SIMONE MONASEBIAN
Chief
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
Simone Monasebian, Esq. is Chief of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) New York Office. She has been a relentless advocate for the rights of survivors, and trained lawyers, prosecutors, judges and diplomats on combating human trafficking.
Since 2005, Ms. Monasebian has led UNODC’s instrumental contribution at UN headquarters to prevent and combat human trafficking, working closely with the General Assembly and Security Council. She is credited with being the Secretariat’s architect behind the processes resulting in the establishment of the landmark United Nations Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons as well as its UN Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children.
She coordinated the UN Secretariat’s negotiations of each General Assembly review of the Global Plan of Action and was the driving force behind the appointment of the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassadors against trafficking in persons, as well as the decision to appoint a survivor of human trafficking Nobel Laureate Nadia Murad as the first UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.
Ms. Monasebian has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Human Trafficking and the Law in Seton Hall Law School’s Zanzibar program, which she co-founded, and has also taught International Criminal law in Seton Hall’s Cairo Program.
She has additionally served as CourtTV’s on air legal analyst on international criminal trials and terrorism. Prior to joining UNODC, she served as the first Principal Defender at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and before that as a Trial Attorney with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Office of the Prosecutor, where she prosecuted war criminals in complex, multi-defendant cases. She was one of the prosecutors responsible for the 2003 landmark convictions of three media executives who fanned the flames of genocide in their newspaper and radio station. That case raised important principles concerning the role of the media, which had not been addressed at the level of international criminal justice since Nuremberg.
Her work was prominently profiled in the book, “Justice on The Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes and a Nation's Quest for Redemption” by Dina Temple-Raston (2005), and in the 2018 Sundance Award winning (best director) documentary feature “On Her Shoulders” about Nobel Laureate Nadia Murad.
In the 1990s, Ms. Monasebian practiced law in a New York firm specializing in complex national and international criminal and human rights matters. She is a member of the New York, Connecticut and District of Columbia bars, and began her career as a journalist with a nationally syndicated radio program, where she became one of the very first journalists covering rap and hip hop culture in the early 1980s.
2019 GALA DINNER | MASTER OF CEREMONIES
RICHARD LUI
Anchor
MSNBC News
Richard Lui is an American journalist and news anchor for MSNBC and NBC News. Previously, he anchored at CNN Worldwide. Lui focuses on stories related to humanitarian issues, and his enterprise reporting has included topics of gender/racial equality, affordable housing, and human trafficking.
Because of his work in these areas, NGOs have invited Lui to help their organizations. Along with Freida Pinto and Marcia Cross, Lui is ambassador for Plan International USA, part of a 70-country federation working for child gender equality. He also is an ambassador for the Epilepsy Foundation, and the anti-slavery organization Not For Sale. Lui is a UN Foundation Fellow, and sits on the President's council for America's largest food source to the poor, Food Bank for New York City. His community work spans 30 years and six continents. He has received civil rights awards from several national organizations, including AAAJ (the equivalent of the NAACP for AAPIs), AAJA, WWAAC, and OCA.
Lui is an active columnist, contributing to publications. Most of his writing, speaking, and social media activity involve issues related to his charitable and humanitarian work. In the last several years, Lui spoke at over 200 events, and twittercounter.com has him in the top 1%.
He anchors the Western edition of Early Today on NBC and various programs on MSNBC from 30 Rockefeller Plaza. At CNN Worldwide, he became the first Asian American male to solo-anchor a daily, national cable news show in the U.S.
Before journalism, Lui spent 15 years in business with Fortune 500 and tech companies. He patented a global payment system and co-founded a Citibank carve-out. Business Insider recognized Lui as one of 21 dynamic careers to watch alongside Mark Cuban and Warren Buffett.
Read about and see photos from
The 2018 Humanitarian Awards Dinner
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