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Jailed Sri Lankan journalist
wins top media freedom award
WSN Bureau
 NEW YORK: At a
time when the media in Punjab is merely being a moot witness to
indiscriminate arrests of panthic leaders, elsewhere in the free
world the fourth estate is setting examples that will put any Indian
media organisation to shame.
While Punjab
Police is busy raiding the offices of community journals, a Sri
lankan journalist and human rights activist who has been jailed for
20 years by the establishment, is to be honored by the Committee to
Protect Journalists.
The CPJ in a
statement said imprisoned Sri Lankan journalist J.S. Tissainayagam
will be awarded the 2009 International Press Freedom Award. He is
one of five journalists who will be honored by CPJ at a ceremony in
November. The full slate of awardees, selected by CPJ’s Board of
Directors this summer, will be formally announced this month.
A Colombo High
Court sentenced Tissainayagam to 20 years of hard labor in the first
conviction of a journalist under the country’s harsh anti-terror
laws.
Tissainayagam,
known as Tissa, suffers from poor health and said his confession to
the charge was extracted under threat of torture, according to his
lawyers.
“We are
announcing this award to highlight the depth of outrage at this
unjust sentence,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “Its
harshness and the retroactive nature of the charges reflect
vindictiveness and intolerance. We are calling today for
Tissainayagam’s release—an appeal we plan to repeat at our awards
ceremony, when the world’s leading journalists gather to demand
press freedom for all of our colleagues.”
T e r r o r i s
m Investigation Division officials arrested Tissainayagam, an
English-language columnist for the Sri Lankan Sunday Times and
editor of the news website OutreachSL, on March 7, 2008, when he
visited their offices to inquire about the arrest of colleagues the
previous day.
He was held
without charge under emergency regulations before his indictment in
August 2008 for artic les published nearly three years earlier in a
now-defunct magazine, North Eastern Monthly.
His two
colleagues, Vettivel Jasikaran and Vadivel Valamathy, also face
anti-terror charges for aiding and abetting Tissainayagam. U.S.
President Barack Obama highlighted Tissainayagam’s case during his
World Press Freedom Day address in May.
16
September 2009
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