BAJ nominates National Union of Journalists of Ukraine for UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize

On 24 Feb­ru­ary last year, Ukraine faced a bru­tal and inhu­mane attack ini­ti­at­ed by Rus­sia. Among thou­sands of inno­cent vic­tims, the jour­nal­is­tic com­mu­ni­ty also suf­fered big human loss­es.

Yet, despite the shelling of peace­ful cities, attacks and shoot­ings of jour­nal­ists and entire film crews, the seizure and destruc­tion of media offices by Russ­ian invaders, Ukrain­ian jour­nal­ists have shown extra­or­di­nary courage and pro­fes­sion­al­ism. Risk­ing their lives every day, they do their best to con­vey the real pic­ture of the war to the Ukrain­ian pub­lic and the world.

From the first min­utes of the full-scale war, the Nation­al Union of Jour­nal­ists of Ukraine switched to a round-the-clock work mode. Evac­u­a­tion from the bat­tle­fields, orga­niz­ing pro­tec­tive equip­ment, reset­tle­ment and sup­port pro­grams, relo­ca­tion of jour­nal­ists and their fam­i­lies from the occu­pied ter­ri­to­ries, pro­vid­ing sup­port for edi­to­r­i­al offices and indi­vid­ual jour­nal­ists, shar­ing impor­tant infor­ma­tion and pro­tec­tive gear with for­eign jour­nal­ists in Ukraine, open­ing Jour­nal­ists Sol­i­dar­i­ty Cen­ters around the coun­try, and a huge amount of tech­ni­cal assis­tance for media work­ers – this is just a small por­tion of what NUJU has done over the past year.

More­over, in 2021–2022, the Nation­al Union of Jour­nal­ists of Ukraine, as a long-stand­ing and reliant part­ner of the BAJ, keen­ly helped Belaru­sian inde­pen­dent media work­ers who had to flee Belarus because of repres­sion.

Con­sid­er­ing the above, as well as the years-long NUJU con­tri­bu­tion to press free­dom defense, the Belaru­sian Asso­ci­a­tion of Jour­nal­ists decid­ed to nom­i­nate the Ukrain­ian part­ner for the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Free­dom Prize.