Here is the slightly edited text of an e-mail that I just received about Dawit ISAAK, who will receive the Golden Pen of Freedom at the Congress in Vienna:
"23 September 2011 marks the 10th anniversary of the incarceration of Dawit Isaak, an Eritrean-born journalist with dual Swedish nationality who was imprisoned in Eritrea for speaking out for justice. In 2001, Dawit's newspaper Setit published a number of calls for reform that resulted in his imprisonment alongside other critical journalists and opposition politicians. To date, his family has received very little news of his health or whereabouts.
On 23 September 2011 we call on you to highlight the plight of Dawit Isaak and countless other prisoners of conscience in Eritrea by republishing some of our exclusive content. Please use and diffuse our materials widely, and be sure to visit www.freedawit.com to see how you can get involved in the campaign to Free Dawit Isaak.
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Peter Englund is the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He used the opportunity of this year's World Press Freedom Day campaign to highlight the plight of WAN-IFRA's 2011 Golden Pen of Freedom laureate, Dawit Isaak, incarcerated for a decade without charge in a notorious Eritrean jail. In his essay, Peter explores how the right to dissent and question strengthens a nation, and why this universal of rights should not be taken for granted.
Aspiring independent journalists in any war-ravaged, poverty-stricken country face a daunting task. If you add famine, military dictatorship, and the fact that the particular country in question is Eritrea, this task becomes nigh on impossible. In such a context the achievements of Dawit Isaak, co-founder of the country’s first independent newspaper and laureate of the 2011 WAN-IFRA Golden Pen of Freedom, are all the more remarkable.
In October 2010, The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers named Dawit Isaak the 2011 Golden Pen of Freedom, WAN-IFRA's annual award that recognises individuals or organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to the defence and promotion of press freedom.
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