The UN announced Tuesday night that its premier prize for press freedom has been awarded to three imprisoned Iranian female journalists “for their commitment to truth and accountability.”
The winners are Niloufar Hamedi who broke the news that 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died last September while being held by the morality police for wearing her headscarf too loosely, and Elaheh Mohammadi who wrote about her funeral.
Amini’s death touched off months-long protests in dozens of cities across Iran. The demonstrations posed one of the most serious challenges to the Islamic Republic since the 2009 Green Movement protests drew millions to the streets.
photo: AFP
The third winner is Narges Mohammadi, who has worked for many years as a journalist and is one of Iran’s most prominent activists.
The UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization World Press Freedom Prize is named for Guillermo Cano, a Colombian journalism who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper El Espectador in Bogota on Dec. 17, 1986. UNESCO has awarded the prize to coincide with World Press Freedom Day on May 3 since 1997.
UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay announced the winners at a ceremony in New York, saying: “Now more than ever, it is important to pay tribute to all women journalists who are prevented from doing their jobs and who face threats and attacks on their personal safety.”
photo: AFP
Zainab Salbi, chair of the international jury of media professionals that chose the winners, said the brave work of the three winners “led to a historical women-led revolution.”
“They paid a hefty price for their commitment to report on and convey the truth,” Salbi said. “And for that, we are committed to honoring them and ensuring their voices will continue to echo worldwide until they are safe and free.”
In late April, Iran’s judiciary acknowledged that two reporters who broke news on Amini’s death, Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, had been indicted on charges of collaborating with the US, acting against national security, and creating “propaganda against the system.”
While nearly 100 journalists have been arrested amid the demonstrations, Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi’s reporting was crucial in the days after Amini’s death to spread word about the anger that followed. Hamedi works for the reformist newspaper Shargh, while Mohammadi works for the reformist newspaper Ham-Mihan.
Their detentions have sparked international criticism over the bloody security force crackdown that lasted months after Amini’s death. According to UNESCO, both Hamedi and Mohammadi have been in Iran’s Evin Prison since September, and Hamedi has been in solitary confinement.
Since the protests began, at least 529 people have been killed in demonstrations, according to human rights activists in Iran. Over 19,700 others have been detained by authorities amid a violent crackdown trying to suppress the dissent. Iran for months has not offered any overall casualty figures, while acknowledging tens of thousands had been detained.
Narges Mohammadi has been repeatedly detained and imprisoned by authorities, and UNESCO said she is currently serving a 16-year prison sentence in Evin Prison. She’s won recognition abroad for her work, including her activism against the death penalty in Iran, which remains one of the world’s top executioners.
UNESCO said she is vice director of the Tehran-based civil society organization, Defenders of Human Rights Center. She also continues to report in print from prison and has interviewed other women prisoners which were included in her book White Torture,” the UN agency said.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS