Bianca Jagger biography
Date of birth : 1945-05-02
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Managua, Nicaragua
Nationality : Nicaraguan
Category : Famous Figures
Last modified : 2010-04-07
Credited as : Activist / Celebrity Icon, first wife of rock star Mick Jagger, Former actress
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Bianca Jagger is the Chair of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation.
She returned to Nicaragua to look for her parents after the 1972 Nicaragua earthquake, which destroyed Managua, the capital, leaving a toll of more than 10,000 deaths and tens of thousands homeless.
In early 1979, Jagger visited Nicaragua with an International Red Cross delegation and was shocked by the brutality and oppression that the Somoza regime carried out there. This persuaded her to commit herself to the issues of justice and human rights.
In the 1980s, she worked to oppose US government intervention in Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution. She has also opposed the death penalty and defended the rights of women and of indigenous peoples in Latin America, notably the Yanomami tribe in Brazil against the invasion of gold miners. She spoke up for victims of the conflicts in Bosnia and Serbia. Her writings were published in several newspapers (including the New York Times and the Sunday Express). From the late 1970s she collaborated with many humanitarian organizations including:
Amnesty International ; Human Rights Watch/America ; Coalition For International Justice ; Indigenous Development International ; People for the American Way .
She is also a member of the Twentieth Century Task Force to Apprehend War Criminals, and a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust. She gave a reading at the start of the memorial service in London's Westminster Cathedral, which was timed to coincide with the funeral in Brazil of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot eight times on a tube-train after being mistaken for a suicide bomber in London. In March 2007 she became involved with Sarah Teather and the campaign to close Guantanamo Bay.
In March 2002, Ms Jagger travelled to Afghanistan with a delegation of fourteen women, organised by Global Exchange to support afghan women’s projects.
On December 16, 2003 Jagger was nominated Council of Europe Goodwill Ambassador.
On July 7, 2007, Jagger presented at the German leg of Live Earth in Hamburg.
From 2007 to 2009 she was Chair of the World Future Council.
In July, 2008 she was a signatory to a petition to the Catholic bishops of England and Wales to allow the wider celebration of the traditional Latin Mass.
In January, 2009 Jagger addressed a crowd— up to 12,000 people according to the police but 60,000 according to the demonstration's organisers—at a march and rally held in Trafalgar Square following a week of protests outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington.
