Claudia Escobar has won the National Endowment for Democracy’s 2017 Democracy Award for her work uncovering corruption in Guatemala. Here is some more info about Claudia Escobar from the National Endowment for Democracy:

Claudia Escobar is a former magistrate of the Court of Appeals of Guatemala and a respected legal scholar. Following her second election to the Court of Appeals in 2014, she became the lead whistleblower in a case of grand corruption that revealed illegal interference in Guatemala’s judiciary by high-ranking political officials including the country’s vice president and the former president of Congress. She is also the founder of the Judiciary Institute and Asociación FIDDI, two organizations dedicated to promoting the rule of law in Guatemala.

Following a series of threats that she received for speaking out against corruption in Guatemala’s judiciary, Judge Escobar left with her family for the United States in 2015 to continue her legal work and advocacy for judicial independence. She spent the 2015–2016 academic year at Harvard University as a Scholar-at-Risk Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is currently a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at NED, where she is examining the impact of international institutions on the fight against corruption in Guatemala.

Here is her profile from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University:

Having grown up in a country marked by impunity, corruption, and violence, Claudia Escobar has dedicated her life to working for the respect of the law and for the promotion of justice, with the conviction that a strong judicial system is the vehicle to build a true “State of Law,” which can bring peace, freedom, and prosperity to her home country of Guatemala. Escobar, a judge, is also a dedicated professor and has taught at different universities, and she was the coordinator of the master’s degree in corporate law at the Universidad Rafael Landívar for more than five years.

During her fellowship, Escobar is pursuing a research project on how corruption is directly linked to the lack of judicial independence. Her research will use Guatemala as an example, and her approach is based on legal perspectives about how judges in the higher courts are appointed without respecting neither international principles nor judicial independence while enabling political entities and other powerful groups to control the justice system and promoting impunity and corruption.

Escobar obtained her PhD and master’s at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, in Spain. She earned her law degree at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala, and received her BA in political sciences from Louisiana State University.

About the National Endowment for Democracy:

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a private, nonprofit foundation dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world. Each year, NED makes more than 1,200 grants to support the projects of non-governmental groups abroad who are working for democratic goals in more than 90 countries.

Since its founding in 1983, the Endowment has remained on the leading edge of democratic struggles everywhere, while evolving into a multifaceted institution that is a hub of activity, resources and intellectual exchange for activists, practitioners and scholars of democracy the world over.