Maria-Dmitry win Nobel Peace Prize-2021

The 2021 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to the journalists and free speech activists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia.

The committee chair, Berit Reiss-Andersen, says the awards have been made for “their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”

Maria Ressa is a Filipino-American journalist and author, the co-founder and CEO of Rappler, who spent nearly two decades as an investigative reporter in south-east Asia for CNN.

In 2020 she was convicted of cyberlibel under a controversial Philippine law against cybercrime, a move widely condemned by rights groups and journalists as an attack on press freedom.

The Guardian published this editoral about Ressa last year, calling her a “courageous journalist” and her conviction a move “designed to chill the media”.

Dmitry Muratov is a Russian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Novaya Gazeta, described by the Committee to Protect Journalists as “the only truly critical newspaper with national influence in Russia today”, which he edited between 1995 and 2017.

Muratov won a CPJ international press freedom award in 2007 for his courage in defending press freedom in the face of attacks, threats and imprisonment. _The Guardian