World Press Freedom Day 2017

Peter Greste is an Australian-born journalist with 25 years experience as a foreign correspondent. He covered the civil war in Yugoslavia and elections in South Africa as a freelance reporter, before joining the BBC as Afghanistan correspondent in 1995. He then covered Latin America, the Middle East and Africa for the BBC. In 2011 he won a Peabody Award for a BBC documentary on Somalia before joining Al Jazeera in East Africa. In December 2013 he was covering Egypt when police arrested him on terrorism charges. After a trial widely dismissed as a sham, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. The following February, after intense international pressure, he was deported under a presidential decree. As a result of letters from prison in the defense of press freedom, Peter won an Australian Walkley Award in 2014, and Royal Television Society and Tribeca Disruptive Innovators’ Awards in 2015. He has also been given the International Association of Press Clubs’ Freedom of Speech Award; Liberty Victoria’s “Voltaire Award”, the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal (all in 2015), and the RSL’s 2016 ANZAC Peace Prize. Peter now works in Australia as a freelance journalist and campaigns on press freedom issues.