“Unfailing courage and selflessness in the pursuit of truth,” saw the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) awarded the US labour
movement’s top human rights honour in March, for its work defending journalists around the world.

Meeting in Las Vegas, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) voted the IFJ the winner of the 2006 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award.

The AFL-CIO presented the award to the IFJ for “its members’ commitment to telling the story at the risk of their lives… From working members of the press who risk their lives and often die to tell the story come the world’s photos, film, videos and news every minute of each
day so we might know what’s really going on,” the AFL-CIO said in a statement.

“We ask IFJ general secretary, Aidan White, to accept this human rights award on behalf of such journalists as Daniel Pearl of The Wall Street Journal, a member of The Newspaper Guild-CWA who was brutally executed on videotape; Russian investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in her apartment building; murdered Mexican journalist Roberto Marcos García; Colombian journalist Santiago Rodríguez Villalba, who was killed by extreme right-wing paramilitaries; and murdered Iraqi journalist and Associated Press cameraman Aswan Ahmed Lutfallah.”

The IFJ reported the deaths of 155 media workers in 2006, its bloodiest year on record.