This Maltese Woman Was Given An International Award By The Queen Of England
Martina Caruana has been selected as one of the Queen’s Young Leaders, a programme that recognises exceptional young people from the 52 Commonwealth countries around the world. There are hundreds of applications to choose from, but Her Majesty The Queen wanted to recognise the work Martina had been doing in Malta.
Marina was chilling at home when she got a call from Buckingham Palace that was going to change her life.
“I was at home in Malta on sabbatical leave for Christmas when I received a phone call from Buckingham Palace,” she told Lovin Malta. “My Labrador retriever, Ralph, was the first one to hear the news! The Queen’s Jubilee Trust informed me that I was not to share the news with anyone until its official announcement on the 5th of December, so I kept all my excitement to myself for a while – but I did let it slip to my mother (and then, of course, my father got to know too).”
It all started in 2011, when Martina had started her first year studying Law at the University of Malta. She took up a job at the Foundation for Social Welfare Services as a supervisor of access visits between non-custodial parents and their children, often-times throwing her right into the middle of emotionally charged situations.
“Here I got to meet, and work with, the most vulnerable people within our society – people living in desperate conditions, prostitutes, substance addicts, abused women; and needless to say children, some of which were undergoing the most horrible situations imaginable. Although my passion for working with the most vulnerable is, I believe, deeply innate and cultivated through personal experience, the five years I spent working with the Agency definitely placed steel into my spine,” she said.
“From carrying a newborn baby, immediately after a care order, from Malta to his new foster family in Gozo, to standing up to high-profile criminals in order to defend their vulnerable children – the experience spiralled my career in the direction it really wanted to go after my graduation,” said Martina.
She now works with the United Nations Legal and Policy Team, presenting human rights cases in front of the International Court of Justice and other European courts, dealing with “victims of female genital mutilation, forced marriage, forced abortions, rape and other forms of gender-based violence. In even more complex cases, I’ve had cases of wartime sexual violence and rape as a crime of war, and that is where the exercise of the beauty of transnational justice comes in,” she says.
She’s also been working hard with other young female leaders to build the Network of Young Women Leaders (NYWL) – a safe space for women and girls.
“Since the day of its launch in March 2017, the Network brought together over 2,500 women and girls, each with a personal experience to tell – gender bias on the work place, sexual assault, domestic violence, abortion, illness, disability, homophobia, inter alia. The honour which I am to receive in June 2018 in Buckingham Palace is for all the women who stand beside me – it is for every little girl who is being abused, for every sex worker who is being trafficked, for every woman forgetting her worth,” she said.
“We really do all move forward once we realise how resilient and striking the women around us are,” she continued.
Martina is now excited to meet the Queen in person, in the international ceremony recognising her and her fellow Queen’s Young Leaders.
“It feels euphoric, really,” she says. “Although through the course of my work I honestly do not seek to receive any recognition, it truly feels surreal to be receiving this honour from the Queen, especially since I am the only Maltese award-winner this year and the very last Maltese to receive this award.”
“I’d like to see this as a national and collateral success,” she continues. “2017 was indeed a breakthrough year for women all across the world; it was a year of resisting, of reckoning. It was a year of rollbacks and new challenges for women and girls in countless countries, It was a year of resilience and resistance on full display.”
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