This year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) awarded the Guillermo Cano Prize for Press Freedom to three women journalists imprisoned in Iran: Niloofar Hamedi, Elaheh Mohammadi and Narges Mohammadi.
“Now, more than ever, it is important to pay tribute to all the women journalists who are prevented from doing their jobs and who face threats and attacks on their personal security,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in a statement. released this Wednesday. .
Jury President Zainab Salbi said “the courageous work of Iranian women journalists” led to “a historic revolution led by women” for which they paid “a heavy price”.
Salbi reiterated the commitment to “honor them and ensure that their voices continue to resonate around the world until they are safe and free.”
Noloofar Hamedi worked for Iran’s main reformist daily, Shargh. It was she who broke the news of the death of the young Mahsa Amini, while she was in police custody, after being arrested on September 16, 2022 for not respecting the use of the Islamic veil.
Hamedi has been held in solitary confinement at Tehran’s Evin prison since September 2022.
Elaheh Mohammadi, who writes for the reformist Ham-Mihan newspaper, reported on Mahsa Amini’s funeral and is also being held in the same prison.
The two received the 2023 Canadian Journalists International Press Freedom Award for Freedom of Expression and the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism from Harvard University.
Time magazine included them in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.
Narges Mohammadi, who has worked for several publications for years, is also deputy director of the non-governmental organization Center for Human Rights Defenders in Tehran.
He is serving a 16-year sentence in Evin Prison, from where he has continued his work as a journalist, including the book of interviews with other prisoners entitled “White Torture”.
In 2022, Mohammadi received the Reporters Without Borders Courage Award.
In 1997, UNESCO created the prize for press freedom in honor of Colombian journalist Guillermo Cano, assassinated in December 1986 in front of the newsroom of his newspaper El Espectador.
The organization recalled that women journalists and other media workers around the world are increasingly facing “disproportionate and targeted” attacks and threats.
Source: TSF
