NCUBE, DINK AND POLITKOVSKAYA WIN 2007 IPA FREEDOM PRIZE

Media For Freedom
Oct 21 2007
Nepal

Trevor Ncube, chief executive of the "only private and critical
newspapers still published in Zimbabwe," and journalists Hrant Dink
and Anna Politkovskaya, who were killed as a result of their work,
are this year’s winners of the International Publishers Association
(IPA) Freedom Prize.

Ncube was honoured for his support of free expression and his courage
as publisher of "The Zimbabwe Independent", "The Standard" and "The
Mail and Guardian". "Despite repeated threats of violence and attempts
to strip him of his Zimbabwean citizenship, Trevor Ncube’s newspapers
have persistently continued to expose corruption and human rights
abuses in Zimbabwe, thus encouraging healthy dissent and criticism,"
said Ana Cabanellas, president of IPA.

This year, IPA is also honouring Hrant Dink and Anna Politkovskaya with
a special Freedom Prize to "celebrate their courage, their humanity,
and their witness." Previously convicted for "insulting Turkishness,"
Dink was editor of the Armenian-Turkish weekly "Agos", which provided
a voice for the Armenian community. He was shot dead in front of his
Istanbul office in January.

Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist for the independent Moscow
paper "Novaya Gazeta", often experienced the wrath of authorities for
reporting on human rights abuses by the Russian military in Chechnya.

She was murdered outside of her home in Moscow in October 2006.

The IPA Freedom Prize will be presented during the opening ceremony
of the 2nd Cape Town Book Fair on 15 June 2007. For more on this
event, whose theme for 2007 is "More than Black on White", see: