Sir Roger Moore receives award for UNICEF work

26-Oct-2007 • Actor News

James Bond actor Roger Moore has been honoured for helping children for more than a decade as a goodwill ambassador for the UN children's agency.

Moore received the Dag Hammarskjold Inspiration Award, named after the UN's second secretary-general who was one of the most esteemed civil servants of the 20th century, from The Dag Hammarskjold Scholarship Fund for Journalists.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was careful not to confuse more than 200 diplomats and journalists at the awards luncheon into thinking he played an international man of mystery.

"My name is Ban, not James Ban (Bond)," he said, turning to Moore. "Everybody knows you were the longest-serving agent 007. Yet you have served as a United Nations goodwill ambassador even longer than that. And you have shown by example, that even tough guys have a licence to care," the secretary-general said.

"Sir Roger, you may have had a licence to kill, but these people ... they have licence to grill," Ban said looking out at the journalists. "Their interrogation methods may appear civilised but they mask an arsenal of special forces techniques."

Moore, who is celebrating his 80th birthday this month, said he became a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in 1991 after Audrey Hepburn, herself a goodwill ambassador, asked him to help at a UNICEF event.

"I would like to say for journalists something very important to my heart," he said. "Young people are children. They are not young goats. And I don't like them being called kids. I think it is disrespectful to children. So please in all your reports write children."

The fund also gave its Chairman's Citation to ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff, for "his dedication to international news and for turning a personal tragedy into an opportunity to inform and reform".

The fund gives scholarships to young journalists from developing countries to cover the autumn session of the UN General Assembly and Ban jokingly urged this year's winners to "please be kind to me!"

The four winners were Benson Amollo, 24, a senior writer for the Times News Service, which publishes Kenya Times and the Sunday Times; Agnes Asiimwe, 30, who works for NTV/Uganda and also writes for the Ugandan Daily Monitor; Tony Hotland, 26, who covers the Indonesian presidency for The Jakarta Post; and Maria Jose Borges Zubelso, 26, who writes about social, health and cultural issues for El Observador newspaper in Montevideo, Uruguay.