Human Rights Winners Announced in Tbilisi

Nona Suvarian, Tbilisi

The Human Rights Center and online newspaper www.humanrights.ge organized competition for journalists and photographers working in the sphere of human rights. Winners were announced on December 17 at the Kopala” Gallery “in Tbilisi.

The Human Rights Center has been organizing the competition on human rights for three years already, which is funded by the Swiss Embassy to Georgia.

Ucha Nanuashvili, the head of the HR Centre, stated that the aim of the competition is to expose problems in the field of human rights. “We also want support journalists in their work because we know how risky their job is.”

Nino Kharadze, jury member from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), spoke about those criteria based on which jury selected the winners. “We paid attention to the professionalism of the author and whether journalists had preserved journalistic standards and as an audience what we could gain from the article, etc”.

The competition was on various nominations. Veriko Tevzadze won for best journalistic investigation; her work was about disabled people fired from jobs; Emzar Diasamidze prize for best cycle of articles and he wrote several articles about the cold blooded murder of Roin Shavadze, a Georgian soldier who was tortured and killed soon after the war in August of 2008. Nino Zuriashvili won the competition for best documentary film about false testimony given by witnesses; Temo Bardzimashvili, Levan Kherkheulidze and Saba Shengelia won in the category of the photo competition on human rights.