Announcing our Inagural President's Award Winner, Antointette Lattouf

 

Posted by Anne Charlton on August 28, 2024

I am humbled to accept the inaugural NSW Council for Civil Liberties President's Award.

It’s an honour to be acknowledged for my battle to uphold journalism without fear or favour, it’s been a very difficult year given the bullying and silencing of journalists in Australia.

I dedicate this award to the journalists who have been murdered doing their jobs. Journalism is not a crime. Systematically killing journalists is.

Gaza is the deadliest place to be a journalist. The past 10 months have been the deadliest period to be a journalist. This award is for the Palestinian journalists who no longer have breath, let alone a voice.

So much has been tested, my ethics and resolve, my faith in democratic institutions and the rule of law. But I refuse to give up hope and give up trying.

The war on Gaza has resulted in the highest number of journalists murdered since the Committee To Protect Journalists formed in 1981. This doesn’t account for journalists arrested by the IDF, missing, injured or now disabled.

Palestinian journalists are bearing witness to war crimes. Journalists have been killed everywhere. In their offices, in the field, in their homes, in their cars, in refugee camps and outside hospitals. Some of these deaths have resulted from precision airstrikes on reporters who are clearly identified as such. Killing the messenger is a sign that the perpetrators fear them and their influence.

Not only is the number of journalists targeted and killed shocking and unacceptable, so too is the silence from the vast majority of my peers in Australia and throughout the western world who purport to care about press freedom and human rights.

Why has there been so much silence (if not disregard) for the senseless and often deliberate slaughter of at least 120 Palestinian journalists? Silence can be a form of complicity.

As journalists, we know all too well that loud, international campaigns for an end to the killings of journalists by Israel could help our colleagues in need. Just as we rallied together to advocate for the release of Australian Peter Greste from an Egyptian prison and more recently Evan Gershkovich from Russia, so too could we help our Palestinian colleagues during their darkest hour. It’s a moral choice.

These journalists get up each day, don their press vests in an apartheid state, unsure if they will survive when the sun sets. Without protection, equipment, international presence, communications, or food and water, they still report what is happening in the most unsafe place on earth.

Their deaths are often minimised, justified, if not outright ignored or cloaked in misinformation that can rarely be challenged or fact checked.

When Western nations affirm the importance of press freedom, human rights, and democratic values, it's clear these standards only apply sometimes, with a heap of conditions* and our leaders turn a blind eye to violations whenever it’s politically or financially convenient.

Please take a moment to remember these journalists who deserve far more praise than I do.

 

https://www.nswccl.org.au/antointette_lattouf