President Tsai takes part in Human Rights Press Awards ceremony

2024/05/14

President Tsai Ing-wen attended the 2024 Human Rights Press Awards May 10 in Taipei City, reiterating Taiwan’s commitment to advancing freedom, democracy and human rights to build a world where all can live in dignity.
 
The president congratulated the recipients of the annual awards, saying that their work to present truth to the world inspires people to take action. Holding the awards in Taiwan testifies to the country’s decades of hard work to build protections for media freedom after nearly 40 years of martial law, she added.
 
According to Tsai, the government has implemented a raft of measures to defend democracy and safeguard human rights. These include legalizing same-sex marriage in 2019, establishing the National Human Rights Commission in 2020 and launching its first National Human Rights Action Plan in 2022.
 
While Taiwan is not a member of the U.N., the government voluntarily incorporated six international covenants on human rights into domestic law, including the U.N. International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and issues national reports assessing their implementation.
 
Thanks to these efforts, Taiwan ranks high on lists rating press freedom around the world, Tsai said, citing Freedom House’s 2024 Freedom in the World report. It is also home to 176 correspondents from 86 media outlets originating in 22 countries, about double 2016’s figures, a fact that the president said she took pride in as she looks forward to Taiwan continuing to be the home for free press in Asia.
 
Jointly organized by Human Rights Watch, Arizona State University, the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents’ Club and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, the awards celebrate outstanding reporting on human rights issues in Asia.
 
This year’s winners in the investigative writing category are the Guardian and Initium, Agence France-Presse for photography, Al Jazeera in multimedia, BBC Chinese and Deutsche Welle for documentary video, and Frontier Myanmar in the podcast category. Zan Times, based in Canada but focused on Afghanistan, shared a win in the newsroom in exile category with Frontier Myanmar.


Source: Taiwan Today (https://taiwantoday.tw/index.php)