Jailed China Blind Lawyer Honored International Award
Posted by chinaview on March 15, 2007
BBC News, 14 March 2007-
Five “defenders of free speech”, including a blind Chinese lawyer and a jailed Egyptian blogger, have been honoured at a London awards ceremony.
The annual Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards salute people who have contributed to the defence of freedom of expression.
They are given to those who use film, the law, books, journalism, campaigning or whistleblowing to achieve this.
The awards’ organisers said each winner was symbolic of under-reported stories.
The whistleblower award went to Chen Guangcheng (photo above), a self-taught lawyer in the Shandong province of China.
Known as the “barefoot lawyer”, he is a blind activist who publicised reports of forced abortions, as late as eight months pregnant, and sterilisations in the city of Linyi to enforce China’s one-child policy.
Mr Chen was sentenced in August 2006 to over four years in prison for property damage and organising a crowd to disturb traffic.
The 2007 award for journalism went to 22-year old blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman, who wrote under the name Kareem Amer.
He was recently sentenced to four years in prison after using his web log to criticise the country’s top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university, and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator.
The literature award went to assassinated Lebanese journalist Samir Qasir, well known for his criticism of the former pro-Syrian Lebanese authorities, for his book Being Arab.
Qasir died in a Beirut car bomb attack in 2005…… ( more details from BBC News)
