RSF PRESS FREEDOM AWARDS

The 2024 ceremony will mark the first time the annual awards ceremony has been held in the United States. This year, winners will be chosen in the following categories: Courage, Impact, Independence, and Lucas Dolega - SAIF Photo Prize. RSF will also present a new award made in memory of the courageous Malian journalist, Mohamed Maïga - RSF African Investigative Journalism Award. The ceremony will be hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Reporters Without Borders' Board Member and prominent journalist for The New York Times and CNN. Michel Martin, Emmy-winning journalist and host of NPR's Morning Edition, will serve as the keynote speaker, and Aïssa Maïga, renowned French actress, will present our new award.

For the past 30 years, the RSF Press Freedom Awards have honored journalists and media outlets whose work has made an exceptional contribution to the defense or promotion of press freedom across the world. In recent years, the ceremony has been held in Paris, Taipei, London, and Brussels, and the December 2024 ceremony in Washington, DC will mark the first time the awards will be awarded in the United States. Winners are chosen in three categories: Courage, Impact, and Independence. In 2023, the awards were presented to Mohamed Ibrahim Radwan, an Egyptian journalist repeatedly jailed and placed under surveillance; Juan Pablo Barrientos, a Colombian journalist who has been persecuted and subjected to censorship attempts because of his investigations; and Jose Rubén Zamora, a Guatemalan editor that exposed political corruption for two decades. RSF also selected Karine Pierre to receive the first annual Lucas Dolega-SAIF Photo Prize. The 2023 awardees were honored in a ceremony in Brussels in November. In addition, previous ceremonies have had up to 500 attendees with live broadcasting, international media coverage, and distinguished individuals delivering inaugural speeches, such as Nobel Peace Prize winners Dimitri Muratov in 2022 and Oleksandra Matviichuk in 2023.

RSF convenes a jury, chaired by RSF president Pierre Haski and consisting of leading journalists and free speech defenders from all over the world, to select the winners. They are Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist and Washington Post columnist; Raphaëlle Bacqué, a leading French reporter for Le Monde; Mazen Darwish, a Syrian lawyer and president of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression; Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist and communication consultant; Erick Kabendera, a Tanzanian investigative reporter; Hamid Mir, a Pakistani news editor, columnist and writer; Frederik Obermaier, a German investigative journalist with Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper; and Mikhail Zygar, a Russian journalist and founding editor-in-chief of Dozhd, Russia’s only independent TV news channel. As a result of the creation of the new “Lucas Dolega-SAIF” Photo Prize category, two well-known war reporters, Véronique de Viguerie and Patrick Chauvel, have joined the jury this year. 

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Reporters Without Borders, known by its French acronym RSF, is the world’s largest organization devoted to the safety, pluralism, and independence of journalism. RSF has 13 offices around the world and a network of correspondents spanning 144 countries. RSF USA, RSF’s office in North America, was founded in 2004 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, and oversees the United States, Canada, and English-speaking Caribbean countries. RSF USA advocates on behalf of journalists killed, missing, imprisoned, or held hostage around the world and maintains an assistance fund to support families of American journalists in crisis abroad. RSF actively fights back against the enemies of press freedom and is at the forefront of solutions to combating disinformation and protecting freedom of expression.