Journalists Receive Human Rights Award: Last year, at least 155 journalists worldwide were killed

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/03/08/journalists-receive-human-rights-award/

Journalists Receive Human Rights Award

by James Parks, Mar 8, 2007

Last year, at least 155 journalists worldwide were killed while trying to find the truth, the worst year on record, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

Journalists who have been murdered, assassinated or killed under mysterious circumstances include:

* Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal and a member of The Newspaper Guild-CWA, who was brutally executed on videotape in Pakistan in 2002;
* Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow last October; and
* Mexican journalist Roberto Marcos Garcia, who was killed in November 2006.

In recognition of these journalists and others who showed unfailing courage and selflessness to deliver the real story to the rest of the world, the AFL-CIO Executive Council voted at its winter meeting to present the 2006 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award to the IFJ on behalf of media workers around the world.

The resolution reads in part:

From the world-renowned to the lesser known, media men and women have been imprisoned, tortured and assassinated only because they tried to tell a story….Members of the media were prime targets of terrorist attacks in Iraq, with 69 media staff killed last year. Second only to Iraq was the Philippines, where 13 journalists died in 2006. In Latin America, where at least 37 deaths are recorded, Mexico moved ahead of Colombia as the deadliest country for journalists with 10 deaths, many of them of investigative reporters. Victims such as Politkovskaya in Russia were targeted for assassination with political motives. Others died at the hands of gangsters. In Africa, journalists were killed with impunity in Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

You can read the entire resolution here.

The Brussels, Belgium-based IFJ is the world’s largest organization of journalists, representing about 500,000 members in 117 countries. The nonpartisan IFJ promotes international action to defend press freedom and social justice through strong, free and independent trade unions of journalists.

Past recipients of the Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award include such heroic figures as Wellington Chibebe, the recently brutalized leader of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions; imprisoned Nigerian trade union leader Frank Kokori; Muchtar Pakpahan of the Indonesia Labor Welfare Union (SBSI); Han Dongfang, China’s independent worker-leader; and, most recently, Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA).