Triggs named 2017 recipient of the Voltaire award as her five-year contract comes to an end

Gillian Triggs will receive a top award for freedom of speech one week before her five-year contract as Australian human rights commissioner expires.

Triggs, who has been consistently criticised by the Abbott and Turnbull governments for her condemnation of Australia’s treatment of refugees, was named the 2017 recipient of the Voltaire award by Liberty Victoria on Tuesday for her “courageous stand on people’s rights”.

“It’s a recognition of her work and the courage she has exhibited in the face of very withering criticism from the government from time to time,” Prof Spencer Zifcak, acting president of Liberty Victoria, told Guardian Australia.

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“Most people would just have resigned in the face of the criticism that she has received.”

Senior government ministers, including the attorney general, George Brandis, and the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, have called for Triggs’ resignation over the past two years in response to her criticism of the treatment of refugees, particularly children, in Australia’s offshore detention centres on Manus and Nauru.

Triggs responded to what she described as “highly personal” criticism by saying that resigning in the face of such attacks was “the very reverse of what I ought to be doing”.

In November the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, confirmed that Triggs’ role as human rights commissioner would end when her contract expired in mid-2017, and Triggs told Guardian Australia she had not sought reappointment.

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Zifcak said the decision to give the Voltaire award to Triggs was not intended as a political statement against the government. For an institution formed by human rights lawyers who frequently attack governments of all political stripes, he said, invoking some political ire “just goes with the territory”.

Triggs is expected to accept the award at ceremony in Melbourne in July.

Triggs said she was “honoured” to receive the award and congratulated the other winners in a statement that referenced the controversy over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which the government attempted to water down.

“It’s so important that we strike the balance between speaking freely and protecting people for racial abuse,” she said.

The cartoonist Eaten Fish, an Iranian asylum seeker held in detention on Manus Island since 2013, will receive the empty chair award, founded last year for recipients who are unable to accept in person.

Eaten Fish produces work about life in detention and has received an award for courage in editorial cartooning by the Cartoonists Rights Network International. In February he went on a 19-day hunger strike to protest against the immigration department’s handling of his claims of sexual abuse.

“Again, we are talking about courage here,” Zifcak said. “This is a person who is undergoing both physical and psychological suffering as a direct result of being in detention but is still willing to get out there and make it clear how people are being treated in that environment and criticise both the Australian and Papua New Guinean governments for their cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment on Manus and Nauru.”

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Seventeen-year-old Georgia Stone will receive the inaugural young Voltaire award for her advocacy on behalf of transgender children and adolescents.

Stone was 10 years old when she won a landmark case in the family court to be allowed to to take hormone blockers, a case that set the precedent of trans children only needing parental and medical consent to access that treatment. Trans people under the age of 18 still need the permission of the family court to access cross-sex hormone therapy.

She was named the GLBTI person of the year in 2016.