Among the recipients are:
Gabriela Adamesteanu, a celebrated Romanian novelist who has faced numerous threats since assuming the editorship of Romania´s most important political weekly, “22;”
- Vann Nath, one of few survivors of the Khmer Rouge secret prisons, who wrote a memoir and has painted prison scenes for the genocide museum; and
- Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who has reported on torture and maltreatment of Chechen villagers by Russian forces.
The Hellman/Hammett grants are given annually by Human Rights Watch to writers around the world who have been targets of political persecution. The grant program began in 1989 when the estates of American authors Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett asked Human Rights Watch to design a program for writers in financial need as a result of expressing their views. This year´s grants totaled $175,000.
In many countries, governments use military and presidential decrees, criminal libel, and sedition laws to silence critics, often on trumped up charges. Writers and journalists are threatened, harassed, assaulted, indicted, jailed or tortured merely for providing information from nongovernmental sources. In addition to those who are directly targeted, many others are forced to practice self-censorship.
