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Zimbabwean lawyer honoured
Julia Day, The Guardian
March 23, 2006

A media lawyer who defended Daily Telegraph and Guardian journalists in Zimbabwe has been honoured with an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award. Beatrice Mtetwa was among those whose "outstanding contribution" to defending or promoting free expression was honoured last night at a ceremony hosted by Anna Ford in London.

The Index on Censorship law and campaigning award went to Ms Mtetwa, a well-known media and human rights lawyer, who has been working to defend journalists detained in Zimbabwe. She is regularly threatened and has been beaten.

Ms Mtetwa secured the release of Daily Telegraph journalists Toby Harnden and Julian Simmonds, who had been charged with working in Zimbabwe without accreditation following their critical reporting of the presidential elections.

She also defended and won acquittal for Andrew Meldrum, the Guardian's former correspondent in Harare, after he was illegally abducted and expelled from Zimbabwe.

Index's whistleblowing award was given to former Chinese Communist party official Huang Jingao, who caused a national sensation on August 11 2004, with an open letter which complained that his efforts to investigate and prosecute corruption were being thwarted by high-level party and government officials who were protecting one another.

Communist Party authorities replaced Mr Jingao with his deputy and in November 2005 he was sentenced to life in prison.

The Guardian-sponsored Hugo Young award for journalism was handed to Sihem Bensedrine, the editor of the banned online Tunisian magazine Kalima.

Mr Bensedrine, the secretary general of the Observatory for Defence of Freedom of the Press, Publishing and Creation and the head of the National Council for Freedom in Tunisia, has often been harassed by officials and was once briefly imprisoned for "defamation" after discussing Tunisian corruption on a London-based Arabic TV station.

Two books by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld - Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide, The Survivors Speak and A Time for Machetes: The Rwandan Genocide, The Killers Speak - won the book award for
2006 for breaking the silence on one of the most devastating episodes of human extermination in recent history.

Turtles Can Fly by Bahman Ghobadi won the film award. Set in Kurdistan in the days leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, the story centres on a group of children struggling to survive in a landscape where there are more landmines per square metre than anywhere else in the world.

Index on Censorship was founded in 1972 by the poet Stephen Spender in response to a plea for help from Soviet dissidents facing show trials in Moscow and was founded on the principle that freedom of expression is a fundamental human right.

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