| International Press Freedom Awards | |
|---|---|
| Awarded for | courage in defending press freedom in the face of attacks, threats or imprisonment |
| Location | New York City |
| Country | United States |
| Presented by | Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) |
| First awarded | 1991 |
| Website | Awards website |
The CPJ International Press Freedom Awards honor journalists or their publications around the world who show courage in defending press freedom despite facing attacks, threats, or imprisonment. [1] Established in 1991, the awards are administered by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent, non-governmental organization based in New York City. [2] In addition to recognizing individuals, the organization seeks to focus local and international media coverage on countries where violations of press freedom are particularly serious. [3]
Every November four to seven individuals or publications are honored at a banquet in New York City and given an award. [4] The ceremony also honors the winner of the Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for "lifelong work to advance press freedom". [5] Past hosts have included crime correspondent and former hostage Terry A. Anderson, [6] Amanpour host Christiane Amanpour, [7] and NBC Nightly News anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw. [1] [3] In 1998, the ceremony was briefly disrupted by protesters who unfurled a banner calling for the release of former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal from Pennsylvania's death row. [8]
The first awards were given in 1991 to American photojournalist Bill Foley and his wife, journalist Cary Vaughan; Cameroonian reporter Pius Njawé; Chinese dissidents Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming; Russian television news anchor Tatyana Mitkova; and Guatemalan reporter Byron Barrera. [9] In 2014, the organization awarded its twenty-fourth group of journalists. [10] On three occasions, an award was also given to a news organization of which multiple staffers have been at risk: Tajikistan newspaper Navidi Vakhsh (1994), several reporters of which murdered during the 1992–1997 civil war; [11] Guatemalan newspaper Siglo Veintiuno (1995), which was subject to police and army raids for its uncensored coverage of government corruption and human rights violations; [12] and Turkish newspaper Özgür Gündem (1996), which was subject to a campaign of publication bans, assassinations, and arrests for its reporting on the conflict between the Turkish Armed Forces and the Kurdistan Workers' Party. [13]
Occasionally, imprisoned laureates accept their awards at a later ceremony, such as China's Jiang Weiping, who was awarded in 2001 but attended the ceremony in 2009, [14] and Azerbaijan's Eynulla Fatullayev, who was awarded in 2009 but attended the ceremony in 2011. [5] Sri Lankan reporter J. S. Tissainayagam was also awarded in 2009 while imprisoned, but was released in time to attend the 2010 ceremony, quipping in his acceptance speech: "Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies for being late." [3]
The award was given posthumously on three occasions: to David Kaplan, an ABC News producer killed by a sniper in Sarajevo in 1992; [6] to Paul Klebnikov, a Russian Forbes journalist shot to death in 2004 by unknown attackers; [15] and to Atwar Bahjat, an Iraqi journalist for Al Arabiya who was abducted and murdered in February 2006. [16] A number of other laureates had been threatened or attacked in the year preceding their award, such as Guatemalan journalist Byron Barrera (1991), whose wife was murdered in an attack on their car, [17] and Željko Kopanja (2000), who lost his legs in a car bomb. [18] Other laureates have been killed after their awards, such as Irish crime reporter Veronica Guerin (1995), awarded a year before her murder, [19] and Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana (1991), awarded two years before being fatally shot by a US soldier in Iraq. [20] Eritrean journalist Fesshaye Yohannes (2002) died while still imprisoned; owing to conflicting reports and the secrecy of his confinement, the cause and year of his death remain unclear. [21]
This list includes the recipients of the award as recorded at the official CPJ website. It is sortable by year, name, and country; owing to naming conventions in different countries, not all names are sorted by last name. Names in italics are publications which have received the award.
| † | Award received posthumously |
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is an American independent non-profit, non-governmental organization, based in New York City, with correspondents around the world. CPJ promotes press freedom and defends the rights of journalists. The American Journalism Review has called the organization, "Journalism's Red Cross." Since the late 1980s CPJ has been publishing an annual census of journalists killed or imprisoned in relation to their work.
Paul Klebnikov was an American journalist and historian of Russia. He worked for Forbes magazine for more than 10 years and at the time of his death was chief editor of the Russian edition of Forbes. His murder in Moscow in 2004 was seen as a blow against investigative journalism in Russia. Three Chechens accused of taking part in the murder were acquitted. Though the murder appeared to be the work of assassins for hire, as of 2022, the alleged organizers of the murder had yet to be identified. According to another version, widely reported in Russian media, Klebnikov was killed by a close associate to the high-ranking member of Lazansky organized criminal gang linked both to the Russian FSS service and Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch.
José Rubén Zamora Marroquín is an industrial engineer, entrepreneur, and the founder of three Guatemalan newspapers: Siglo Veintiuno in 1990, El Periódico in 1996, and Nuestro Diario in 1998. He has been threatened and attacked on several occasions for his work, including being held hostage in his home in 2003 and being kidnapped and beaten in 2008.
Jiang Weiping is a veteran mainland Chinese journalist known internationally for his arrest by the Chinese Communist Party in 2001.
Gustavo Andrés Gorriti Ellenbogen is a Peruvian journalist known for his reporting on rebel groups, government corruption, and drug trafficking. In 2011, the European Journalism Centre described him as having "been awarded more prizes than probably any other Peruvian journalist". He is the founder of IDL-Reporteros.
Željko Kopanja was a Bosnian newspaper editor and director of the newspaper Nezavisne Novine. The Christian Science Monitor described him as an equal critic of all parties without regard to ethnicity and "probably the most feared journalist in Bosnia and Herzegovina." On August 8, 2016 Željko Kopanja died from a cardiac arrest.
Christiana "Chris" Anyanwu MFR is a Nigerian journalist, publisher, author, and politician. She was imprisoned from 1995 to 1998 for treason after reporting on a failed coup d'état against the government of Sani Abacha, and won several international journalism prizes during her confinement, including the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize.
Iqbal Athas is a Sri Lankan journalist. He is a defence columnist for the Sunday Times, and he also contributes to Jane's Defence Weekly, CNN, and the Times of London. He was threatened for his investigative reporting which uncovered scandals in the purchase of the arms by Sri Lankan Defence personnel, particularly the Sri Lankan Airforce. He has won several international journalism awards for his work, and in 2000, the New York Times described him as "the country's leading military correspondent."
Ruth Simon is an Eritrean journalist.
Adela Navarro Bello is a Mexican journalist and the general director of the Tijuana weekly magazine Zeta. Zeta, which was founded in 1980, is one of the few publications that frequently reports on organized crime, drug trafficking, and corruption in Mexico's border cities. Multiple editors and reporters working for Zeta have been murdered, including Héctor Félix Miranda, co-founder of Zeta, and co-editor Francisco Ortiz Franco.
Madi Ceesay is a Gambian journalist. He served as president of the Gambia Press Union, and was imprisoned and harassed for his journalistic work. According to the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Ceesay's work has provided critical support for freedom of the press in Gambia, where journalists were frequently imprisoned and attacked.
Dhondup Wangchen is a Tibetan filmmaker imprisoned by the Chinese government in 2008 on charges related to his documentary Leaving Fear Behind. Made with senior Tibetan monk Jigme Gyatso, the documentary consists of interviews with ordinary Tibetan people discussing the 14th Dalai Lama, the Chinese government, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and Han Chinese migrants to the region. After smuggling the tapes of the interviews out of Tibet, however, Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso were detained during the 2008 Tibetan unrest.
Chernovik is a weekly newspaper published by Svoboda Slova and based in the Republic of Dagestan, North Caucasus region, Russia. Reporters Without Borders has described it as "Dagestan's leading independent newspaper" and the newspaper with the third largest circulation in Dagestan.
Umar Cheema is an investigative reporter for the Pakistani newspaper The News. In 2008, he won a Daniel Pearl Journalism Fellowship, becoming the first Pearl fellow to work at The New York Times. He also attended London School of Economics as a Chevening Scholar doing M.Sc. in Comparative Politics.
Navidi Vakhsh was a pro-Islamic, Tajik-language thrice-weekly newspaper of Tajikistan. The paper was published in Khatlon Province, 160 kilometres (100 mi) south of Dushanbe.
Ocak Işık Yurtçu was a Turkish reporter detained for thirty-two months between 1993-1997 by the Turkish government for his reporting on the Kurdish–Turkish conflict, a case The New York Times called "emblematic" of the Turkish press's struggle for press freedom in the 1990s.
African Public Radio is a public radio station in Burundi. In 2009, Le Monde described it as "one of the most widely listened-to stations in the country". The station's motto is "la voix des sans-voix".
Mae Azango is a Liberian journalist for FrontPage Africa. She is particularly known for her reports on female genital mutilation (FGM), which helped suspend the practice in the nation. In 2012, she was awarded the International Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Janet Hinostroza is a television journalist from Ecuador. Her work focuses on the exposure of government corruption. She is the anchor on a morning news program, La Mañana de 24 Horas, and was the creator and anchor of the long-running investigative news program 30 Plus, which aired on Teleamazonas for more than a decade, investigating such subjects as human trafficking, arms trafficking, government and police corruption, and extrajudicial killings.
Cándido Figueredo Ruíz is a journalist for the Paraguayan newspaper ABC Color from Pedro Juan Caballero, Amambay Department, Paraguay. He has received multiple threats against his life for his work in exposing organized crime, drug smuggling across the Brazilian border, and corruption in Paraguay.
