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New York Group Presents International Press Freedom Awards
NEW YORK (AFP) - The editor of a Serbian daily, crippled by a car-bomb attack, and an Iranian editor currently imprisoned for his reporting, were among four journalists to receive international press freedom awards.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists announced the awards Tuesday, at their tenth annual award ceremony for independence in reporting the news in the face of adversity.
The recipients included Zeljko Kopanja, the co-founder and editor of Nezavisne Novine, the largest independent Serbian daily newspaper in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Kopanja lost both his legs in a 1999 car-bomb assassination attempt.
He returned to the newspaper once he had mastered the use of his prosthetic legs. Articles documenting the killing of Bosnian Muslims by Bosnian Serbs, according to the committee, prompted the attack.
Modeste Mutinga, publisher of the Democratic Republic of Congo's only independent newspaper, was also selected for the award. Mutinga has been jailed, threatened and harassed for the work of his Le Potentiel newspaper.
The founder of local press freedom groups, Mutinga is also president of a Congolese coalition working to restore peace to his war-torn nation.
Another recipient, Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, could not attend Tuesday's ceremony because he is currently serving a 30-month prison sentence in Iran's Evin Prison.
A reformist editor of banned Iranian daily newspapers, Shamsolvaezin was jailed in April for allegedly insulting Islamic principles in an article criticizing capital punishment in Iran.
As the editor of the dailies Jameah, Tous, Neshat and Asr-e-Azadegan, he saw his papers banned by Tehran's Press Court between 1998 and 2000, according to the committee.
Steven Gan, the editor of an online Malaysian publication Malaysiakini, was another recipient of the 2000 freedom awards. His work tests the restrictive limit the Malaysian government places on the nation's press, the committee said.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent organization, which promotes the defense of press freedom worldwide.
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