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05/05/21 01:25 AM IST

Journalist Maria Ressa wins Unesco press freedom prize

In News 

  • The UN’s cultural agency has awarded its annual press freedom prize to the Filipino journalist Maria Ressa whose reporting has made her a target of her country’s judiciary and online hate campaigns.
Details 
  • Ressa, a former Asia lead investigative reporter for US network CNN and head of domestic network ABS-CBN News, now manages the news website Rappler whose reporting has attracted the wrath of the Filipino leader, Rodrigo Duterte.
  • She has been involved in many international initiatives to promote press freedom, and arrested several times “for alleged crimes related to the exercise of her profession.
  • Ressa, who was named Time’s person of the year in 2018, was convicted of cyber libel by a Manila court but is free on bail pending an appeal in a case that could see her handed six years in jail.
World Press Freedom Prize 
  • Created in 1997, the annual UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize honours a person, organization or institution that has made an outstanding contribution to the defence and, or promotion of press freedom anywhere in the world, and especially when this has been achieved in the face of danger.
  • The Prize was established on the initiative of UNESCO's Executive Board and is formally conferred by the Director-General of the Organization, on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, on 3 May.
  • It is named in honour of Guillermo Cano Isaza, a Colombian journalist who was assassinated in front of the offices of his newspaper El Espectador in Bogotá, Colombia on 17 December 1986.
Source- The Guardian 

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