Uthayanwins Press Freedom Award

The Jaffna-based Tamil daily – Uthayan-- and imprisoned Uzbek journalist Muhammad Bekjanov are joint winners of Monde and TV5Monde 2013 Reporters without Borders Press Freedom Prize.

The names of the winners were announced during a ceremony at Strasbourg’s City Hall in France.

The awards were presented to Uthayan editor Vallipuram Kaanamylnaathan, Managing Director Eswarapatham Saravanapavan, and to Uzbek human rights defender Nadejda Atayevaon on behalf of Bekjanov, who has been imprisoned for the past 14 years.

“This year, we again salute the exemplary courage of men and women for whom reporting the news is a daily battle,” Reporters Without Borders President Alain Le Gouguec said. “Their activities embody the universal value of media freedom in a real and concrete way. Thanks to them, information becomes a force capable of enlightening, mobilizing and advancing the cause of freedom.”

Uthayan a daily newspaper based in Jaffna, in northern Sri Lanka, is one of the country’s few Tamil-language newspapers and the only peninsula-based paper which continued publishing throughout the 1983 - 2009 civil war.

It is supportive of the Tamil National Alliance, counts 28 years experience and is read by a fifth of the peninsula’s inhabitants.

The Uthayan was awarded the Sepala Gunasena Award for Defending Press Freedom in Sri Lanka by The Editors’ Guild of Sri Lanka in 2008.