New Delhi: The International Press Institute (IPI) on Wednesday named Cyril Almeida, an assistant editor and columnist at Pakistani daily ‘Dawn’ who is currently facing sedition charges in the country, as the recipient of its 71st World Press Freedom Hero award.
The IPI statement lauded Almeida, a former Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, for his “tenacious coverage of the Pakistani state’s patronage of militant groups”, following which he was charged with sedition.
In 2016, Pakistan had imposed a travel-ban on Almeida following his coverage of the 2016 military confrontation between India and Pakistan, wherein India had claimed to have conducted “surgical strikes” beyond the Line of Control.
Almeida, in response to the honour, said he was grateful to the IPI and the International Media Support (IMS) jury for acknowledging the “fight to preserve and protect media freedom in Pakistan”.
“Press freedom in Pakistan is under severe and sustained attack, without precedent during eras of civilian governments and the worst in the country since an oppressive military dictatorship in the 1980s,” he said, accepting the award. “The state’s tolerance for and patronage of externally focused militant groups and a renewed erosion of democracy by the predominant military are issues of fundamental public importance – but coverage and commentary on those issues in the independent media now draws severe state retaliation.”
The IPI said Almeida’s coverage of Pakistan’s military and its involvement in political affairs was an “extraordinarily risky” and “taboo” subject in the country and had often led to state retaliation against him and his employers. “Almeida’s scrutiny of the Pakistani military-security complex has made both him and Dawn a target,” the IPI said.
In 2016, Almeida was banned from leaving Pakistan and subjected to a “widespread smear campaign” for his coverage of the tussle between Pakistan’s military and its civilian government over the former’s insistence on protecting extremist groups.
Last year, Almeida was charged with treason and again slapped with a travel ban when he interviewed former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. In the interview, Sharif, currently serving a 10-year-prison sentence on corruption charges, had hinted that Pakistan’s military aided the militants who carried out the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, in which more than 160 people lost their lives.
The IPI cautioned that journalists in Pakistan were facing a “rapidly deteriorating” environment and were under constant threat of physical harm, legal harassment and disruption. IPI executive director Barbara Trionfi said that Almeida “embodied the dedication to press freedom and courageous public-interest journalism shared by all of IPI’s heroes”.
“Cyril Almeida has demonstrated tremendous resolve in tackling – at great risk to himself – deeply contentious issues that are nevertheless of central importance to Pakistan’s democracy, not least the role of the military in shaping the country’s present and future”, she said. “The response to his reporting has been a campaign of intolerance and state repression. Despite the press freedom crisis engulfing Pakistan, he, and Dawn newspaper, have refused to back down from writing about issues that matter.”
The IPI urged Pakistani authorities to immediately drop all charges against Almeida, calling sedition charges against him “dangerous”, “absurd” and a “gross violation of journalists’ right to disseminate information in the public interest”.
IPI’s World Press Freedom Hero Award honours journalists who have made critical contributions to the promotion of press freedom, particularly in the face of great personal risk. Almeida is IPI’s second World Press Freedom Hero from Pakistan, after Aslam Ali, the former managing director of Pakistan Press International.
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