CPJ announces winners of 2024 International Press Freedom Awards

NEW YORK, Sep 20 (SABAH): The Committee to Protect Journalists announced that it will honor four exceptional journalists with its 2024 International Press Freedom Awards.

This year’s awardees, who cover Gaza, Guatemala, Niger, and Russia, have withstood extraordinary challenges to continue reporting on their communities while experiencing war, prison, government crackdowns, and the rising criminalization of their work.

CPJ will posthumously honor Christophe Deloire, who served as director general of the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), with the 2024 Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, an award presented annually by CPJ’s board of directors in recognition of an individual’s sustained commitment to press freedom. Deloire led RSF for 12 years before his untimely death in June 2024.

The CPJ awards will be presented in New York City on November 21. John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, will be master of ceremonies at the event, which will be chaired by Jessica E. Lessin, founder and CEO of The Information.

Venezuela’s disputed presidential election has ushered in a record number of jailings of journalists. In the case of journalist Ana Carolina Guaita, security agents arrested her shortly after Venezuela’s disputed presidential election in July and then contacted her family to make a deal.

They offered to release Guaita if her mother, Xiomara Barreto, who worked on the opposition campaign to defeat President Nicolás Maduro, turned herself in. Barreto, who is in hiding, rejected the proposal.

“My daughter is being held hostage,” Barreto said in an August 25 voice recording posted on social media five days after her daughter’s arrest. Then, addressing authorities holding Guaita, she said: “You are doing great damage to an innocent person just because you were unable to arrest me.”

In addition to Guaita, Maduro’s regime has jailed at least five other journalists – Paúl León, Yousner Alvarado, Deysi Peña, Eleángel Navas, and Gilberto Reina. (Another, Carmela Longo, has been released but faces criminal charges and has been barred from leaving the country.)

These journalists are among more than 2,000 anti-government protesters and opposition activists who have been detained following the July 28 balloting.

Separately, on Wednesday, CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg urged the U.S. government to show stronger support for press freedom globally at a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (SFRC) event on September 18 honoring media publisher Jimmy Lai.

Lai, who has been imprisoned in Hong Kong since December 2020, was honored with CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award in 2021 for his contributions to press freedom in Hong Kong as the founder of Apple Daily.

Ginsberg told the committee that Lai’s persecution is a symptom of the rapid democratic decline undergone by Hong Kong over the past decade, in particular since Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020. In addition, she stressed that the United States must show that there are economic and political costs for countries that limit press freedom, especially those that use and abuse the law to silence journalists.

Other event attendees included Jimmy Lai’s son, Sebastien Lai, bipartisan members of Congress led by SFRC Chair Sen. Ben Cardin and featuring Speaker Emerita of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation President Mark Clifford, senior State Department officials, nonprofit and human rights advocates, as well as members of the media.