Renew Europe CoR nominated former member Alain Chouraqui, the President of the Camp des Milles Memorial Foundation for Remembrance and Education in Aix-en-Provence, France, for the 2023 Paweł Adamowicz award. 

The Paweł Adamowicz award for courage and excellence in the promotion of freedom, solidarity and equality is has been awarded every year since 2020 to a notable figure working with courage and integrity against intolerance, radicalisation, hate-speech, oppression and xenophobia. 

Chouraqui, as founding president of the Foundation in the 1990s, ensured Camp des Milles was preserved and transformed into a memorial museum, research centre and educational site, the only large internment and holocaust deportation camp still intact and open to the public in France. 

More than 600,000 young people have already visited the Camp, where they are given a new perspective and the opportunity to reflect on the process that led to genocide, how to recognise it and what risks they face today through social media. 

Under Chouraqui’s guidance, Camp des Milles has evolved from a place of remembrance to a place of “remembrance for tomorrow”, appealing to the individual responsibility of all people to recognise and oppose identity-based, nationalistic and religious extremism, and its resulting exclusion and violence.  

Without the intervention and unshakeable dedication of Chouraqui and other local players, including former deportees, what is today a site of historical European significance would have totally disappeared.

Fière d’avoir proposé la nomination d’Alain Chouraqui, Président du @campdesmilles à Aix-en-Pce, pour le prix Adamowicz 2023 au nom du groupe @RenewEuropeCoR

Sa contribution à la mémoire, à la lutte contre l’antisémitisme et à l’éducation est inestimable.https://t.co/V4bv6C3ngB

— Anne Rudisuhli (@AnneRudisuhli) December 12, 2023