World Press Freedom Day

On May 3 the 20th anniversary of the World Day of Press Freedom is celebrated. It was proclaimed for the first time in 1993 by the UN General Assembly.
May 3 1991 was the day of the adoption of the Windhoek Declaration, a statement of principles signed by newspapers’ journalists during a seminar held by UNESCO in Africa on the theme “Promoting African Independent and Pluralistic Press“.
This holiday is celebrated to of remember the journalists killed by mafia and terrorism and those brave women and men died for their job, that is communication. They paid with their lives the desire to inform and they had the courage to denounce.

Over the past decades, more than 500 journalists have been killed and almost every week we read reports of journalists subjected to intimidation and kidnappings. In 2013 freedom of speech has not been fully achieved yet. The following data were recorded during a year:

66 journalists killed

71 journalists kidnapped

1,044 journalists arrested

1,959 journalists abused or threatened

499 media censored

68 countries subjected to Internet censorship

On this day day, every year takes place the official ceremony for the UNESCO / Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize that this year takes place in San José, Costa Rica. The prestigious prizes named in honor of Guillermo Cano Isaza, a Colombian journalist who was murdered in front of the offices of his newspaper “El Espectador“, in Bogotà on the 17th December 1986, because he denounced the illegal drug activities in his country.

The Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu.

The World Press Freedom Prize 2013 will be given to Ethiopian journalist Reeyot Alemu, who has always fought for political and social inequalities between men and women and has analyzed in detail and denounced the causes of poverty, one of the biggest problems that afflicts Ethiopia. For these reasons, in her country Reeyot Alemu has been sentenced to 5 years of jail in the charge of “terrorism”.