Tommy Koh, Runa Khan and Bo Kyi win the 2026 Ramon Magsaysay Awards

The Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation named three winners on 31 August: Tommy Koh of Singapore, Runa Khan of Bangladesh and Bo Kyi of Myanmar. The foundation, which has called its prize Asia's highest honour since 1958, said this 68th round brings the roll to 331 individuals and 28 organisations from 24 countries and territories. The formal citation ceremony is scheduled for 15 November at the Metropolitan Theater in Manila.

Koh is 88. The citation honours his work in diplomacy and international law and his role in training later advocates. He presided over negotiations among about 150 states at the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea. Those talks produced the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the main written framework for how states use the seabed, the exclusive economic zone and the high seas. Koh later served as Singapore's ambassador at large and kept a public brief on heritage and the arts. The award is arriving late in a long career. That is part of the point. UNCLOS is now the text that governments quote when they argue over reefs, cables and fisheries. The man who chaired the room that wrote it is still alive to collect a prize named for a Philippine president who died in 1957.

Khan is 67 and the only woman on this year's list. She founded Friendship, a Bangladeshi organisation that runs a three-tier health system from primary posts to specialist care for communities on the shifting river islands known as chars. She first visited a char in 1997. The foundation highlighted movable schools for climate migrants, buildings that can be taken down in hours and rebuilt when erosion eats the bank. Friendship's work sits at the junction of health, schooling and a river that will not stay still. That is a narrower brief than Koh's, and a more physical one.

The Myanmar file

Bo Kyi is 61. He was jailed for seven years after the 1988 pro-democracy protests in Myanmar. He later fled toward the Thai border to avoid a fresh arrest and, in 2000, co-founded the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners. AAPP records arrests and deaths in custody and supports detainees and their families. The foundation cited his pursuit of truth, accountability and justice. The citation is being issued while the junta that seized power in 2021 is still in place and while AAPP's tallies remain one of the few running counts of political imprisonment that outsiders can check.

The three names form a neat map of what the foundation still thinks Asia needs: a lawyer who writes rules for the sea, a field organiser who moves clinics when the river moves, and a former prisoner who keeps a ledger of the cells. That map is also a limit. The award does not name a climate scientist, a labour organiser or a journalist this year. It names three people whose work is already documented in English-language files that a Manila board can read.

Earlier Indian and South Asian winners sit on the same roll: Ela Bhatt, Kiran Bedi, Baba Amte, Fazle Hasan Abed. Khan now joins that line from Bangladesh. Bo Kyi joins a thinner Myanmar list. Koh joins the diplomats. The cash, the medallion and the November night in Manila are the public part. The private part is whether Friendship's movable schools still stand after the next monsoon, whether AAPP can keep counting inside Myanmar, and whether the next generation of UNCLOS fights over the South China Sea still treats the 1982 text as law rather than a menu.

The foundation was created in 1957 by trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, with the agreement of the Philippine government, to mark Ramon Magsaysay's example of public service after his death in a plane crash. The prize has outlived the Cold War language in which it was born. The 2026 list shows what replaced that language: oceans law, climate displacement and political prisons.