JMI announces winners of human rights award for journalism

AMMAN — The Jordan Media Institute (JMI) on Thursday announced the winners of the Human Rights Reporting Awards for print and online media.

The award seeks to expand public dialogue on human rights and encourage deeper understanding of this issue among journalists, said JMI’s dean, Bassem Tweisi, adding that the award aims at honing participants’ reporting and data journalism skills.

He noted that the region’s political transformation process has been accompanied by socioeconomic and cultural challenges that created an “urgent need” to raise the quality of media coverage. 

Out of the 10 works submitted in the print category, the JMI selected an investigative report by Al Ghad daily’s Nadine Nimri on children born to unidentified parents.

Nimri said that her report, one of a three-part series, discussed the challenges confronted by children with unidentified parents, among which are the absence of a family environment and the burden of social stigma. 

Although many readers disputed the need to discuss this topic in the media, Nimri wanted to “humanise” the suffering of infants who, when left on the street, face higher risk of death and disability.

Ezzedine Natour, from the Community Media Network’s Ammannet.net, won the online prize for his report titled “Death penalty after imprisonment… two punishments for a single crime”, defeating eight other submissions for the category.

He said his report challenges the argument that implementing capital punishment reduces crime rates. 

Both winners cited difficulty in accessing information from official authorities.

Evaluation criteria for the awards included the level of difficulty in obtaining information, effective use of the news format, including clarity and narrative, scope of research, the extent of action generated by the news coverage, creativity, originality and use of innovative reporting tools, such as data journalism.

Participating reports, submitted either in Arabic or English from August 1, 2014 until September 7, 2015, addressed the rights of children, women and refugees, as well as economic rights, human trafficking and other issues.

The competition was part of a two-year partnership between JMI and Canada’s Journalists for Human Rights (JHR) under the project “Expanding Public Dialogue on Human Rights Issues”, supported by the U.S.-Middle East Partnership Initiative and the UN Democracy Fund.  

The project featured 15 workshops on human rights reporting and the use of data journalism tools to run major investigations on human rights issues, with the participation of 235 journalists, journalism students and representatives of civil society organisations, Tweisi said.