Her Majesty Queen Noor

Her Majesty Queen Noor is an international public servant and an outspoken voice on issues of world peace and justice, and PSR-LA is proud to honor her with the 2009 Healing the Planet Award.

She plays an active role in promoting international exchange and understanding of Arab and Muslim culture and politics, Arab-Western relations, and conflict prevention and recovery issues such as refugees, missing persons, poverty and disarmament.  She has also helped found media programs to highlight these issues. Her conflict recovery and peacebuilding work over the past decade has focused on the Middle East, the Balkans, Central and Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Queen Noor’s work in Jordan and the Arab world has focused on national development needs in the areas of education, conservation, sustainable development, human rights and cross-cultural understanding. She is also actively involved with international and UN organizations that address global challenges in these fields.

Since 1979, the initiatives of the Noor Al Hussein Foundation (NHF) which she chairs have transformed development thinking in Jordan and the Middle East through pioneering programs in the areas of poverty eradication and sustainable development, women’s empowerment, microfinance, health, environmental conservation, and arts as a medium for social development and cross-cultural exchange, many of which are internationally acclaimed models for the developing world. NHF provides training and assistance in implementing best practice programs in the broader Arab and Asian regions.

Queen Noor has traveled extensively throughout the Balkans since her first humanitarian mission in 1996 after the fall of Srebrenica. She is a Commissioner of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) created through the Dayton Accords to promote reconciliation and conflict resolution through the search for, recovery, and identification of missing persons from the armed conflicts in the Balkans.  She has assumed an advocacy role in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and has traveled to Central and Southeast Asia, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America to advocate with governments, support NGOs, and visit with landmine survivors struggling to recover and reclaim their lives.  She has testified before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus appealing for humanitarian assistance and justice for hundreds of thousands of landmine victims worldwide.

In 2004 and 2005, as an expert advisor to the United Nations, Queen Noor traveled to Central Asia to advocate for adoption and implementation of the Ottawa Treaty throughout the region and for multi-sectoral commitment to the Millennium Development Goals in Tajikistan, one of the world’s poorest countries.  She is a board member of Refugees International and an outspoken voice for the plight of refugees, displaced persons and other dispossessed people around the world.  She has visited Pakistan to assess the Afghan refugee situation, and is advocating for international support for the nearly 5 million Iraqis displaced in Iraq and in Jordan, Syria and other countries after the 2003 Iraq conflict.

Queen Noor is actively involved in a number of international organizations advancing global peace-building and conflict recovery.  As a Founding Leader since December 2008 of Global Zero, an international effort to eliminate nuclear weapons worldwide, Her Majesty has been a vocal advocate for eradicating weapons of mass destruction. She is an advisor to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Seeds of Peace, Council of Women World Leaders, Women Waging Peace, and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and International Patron and Honorary Chair of Survivor Corps.