2023 Award Winners

Graduate Student Symposium on International Journalism and Human Rights

CoMC Excellence in International Journalism and Human Rights Award 2023 Winners

Masih Alinejad, investigative Journalist, Activist and Host at Voice of America TV Persian Service

On January 27, 2023, the United States Department of Justice announced that a federal court in New York had indicted three members of an Eastern European Criminal organization called “Thieves-in-Law” on murder-for-hire and money laundering charges.   The Department of Justice said the criminal enterprise had been hired by the Iranian government to murder a U.S citizen of Iranian origin for speaking out against the regime's human rights abuses.  The target of this murder-for-hire plot was Masih Alinejad, an award-winning Iranian-American investigative journalist and human rights activist. Masih is the host of the Tablet show on the Voice of American (VOA) Persian Service. She is the author of, The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran.”

The Iranian government considers Masih Alinejad enemy #1 and wants to silence her because in the past 8 years, she has fearlessly denounced human rights atrocities in Iran and championed women's right to choose what to wear. Masih Alinejad has bravely and defiantly broadcast or posted “subversive” online videos of women walking unveiled in Iran, in defiance of the Iranian regime's policy against the display of women's hair. With almost 9 million followers, Alinejad's social media accounts have become a clearing house and repository of videos that highlight the human rights of women, journalists, activists, and members of civil society in Iran In 2014, Alinejad launched My Stealthy Freedom (also known as Stealthy Freedoms of Iranian Women), a Facebook page that invites Iranian women to post pictures of themselves without a hijab or veil. The page quickly attracted international attention, and has garnered more than 8 million likes. According to the Attorney General of the United States, the Iranian government finds this activity so threatening that “the Chief Judge of Iran's Revolutionary Courts warned that anyone who sent videos to the victim (Alinejad) criticizing the regime would be sentenced to prison – especially videos contrary to criminal laws mandating that women and girls wear head coverings in public.” 

In addition to her work at the Voice of America Persian Service, Alinejad is a correspondent for Radio Farda, a frequent contributor for Manoto television, and a contributing editor for IranWire.  She has won several awards, including the 2015 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy Women's Rights Award, the Omid Journalism Award from the Mehdi Semsar Foundation, and a "Highly Commended" AIB Media Excellence Award.   On June 13, 2022, she was awarded the American Jewish Committee's Moral Courage Award for speaking out fearlessly in support of the Iranian people being oppressed by the Iranian government. 

VOA Feature on Masih Alinejad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR2u2DYyK1E 

Katerina Sergatskova and Zaborona Media, Ukraine

Katerina Sergatskova is a Ukrainian journalist, TV presenter and writer. She is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of Zaborona.com, co-founder of the 2402 Emergency Fund for Journalists and Photographic Archive of War in Ukraine (WArchive). She is also a board member of the Hromadske Television. She was the Kurt Shork Awards laureate in 2015, the FPA Thomson Foundation Young Journalist Award finalist in 2017, and Free Media Award laureate in 2022.

In November 2021, Katerina published a non-fiction book, Goodbye, ISIS! What remains is the future. The book is about on foreign fighters from Eastern Europe who joined terrorist groups like the Islamic State in Syria. Katerina is also a co-author of the book, The war in three letters (2015) based on reporting from the Russian occupied Crimea, and the war in Donbas, Ukraine. She has also authored the anthology, Euromaidan: History in the making (2014). She has written articles for international newspapers and magazines such as Foreign Affairs, Tablet Magazine, Grazia Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, Esquire, and Ukrainian news outlets: Ukrainska Pravda, Hromadske.ua, NV.ua, and Zaborona. She is also a contributor to the Wilson Center think-tank. 

Zaborona Media

Zaborona means ‘taboo' in Ukrainian. It is an independent news outlet focused on social trends and culture in Eastern Europe. At Zaborona, reporters believe there should be no taboo on stories. This storytelling platform was launched in 2018 by award-winning journalists Katerina Sergatskova and Roman Stepanovych. 

Zaborona is a journalistic collective that provides readers with in-depth reporting and a broader context of current affairs in the region. It covers challenges faced by societies and individuals in terms of their freedoms and security. 

 Video of Katerina Sergatskova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PJcB5ezgvw 

 

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