Syrian blogger gets human rights award

DUBLIN: Syrian woman blogger Razan Ghazzawi has been honored with this year’s Human Rights Defenders at Risk award by the Dublin-based Front Line Defenders foundation, the group announced yesterday.
Ghazzawi, who has become a symbol of the Syrian uprising, is currently on trial before a military court charged with “possessing prohibited materials with the intent to disseminate them.”
Front Line said she was presented with the award at a ceremony in Dublin’s City Hall by Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Societies Foundations and a founder of Human Rights Watch, for her “exceptional contribution” to human rights.
Her colleague Dlshad Othman, who has himself been a target for the Syrian authorities because of his human rights work and had to leave Syria two months ago for his own security, accepted the award on Ghazzawi’s behalf.
In a statement read out on Ghazzawi’s behalf at the ceremony she said she saw the award as being was for all citizen journalists “who died trying to tell the world what’s happening in Syria, when the traditional media have failed to do so.”
“Syrian citizen journalists and filmmakers tell the revolution in all its colors, through the good times and the bad times. And many have died doing so,” she said.
Ghazzawi and six other female activists were recently freed from detention.
They had been arrested during a raid on the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression.
Her colleague and director of SCM, Mazen Darwish is currently being held in incommunicado in detention with four other colleagues.