Manila : An influential Chinese journalist and a crusading environmental lawyer from China are among this year’s winners of Asia’s Magsaysay awards, the organisers announced on Thursday, reports AFP. The Manila-based Ramon Magsaysay Award was established in 1957 to honour people or groups who change communities for the better.
Among this year’s six awardees is Hu Shuli, 61, founder and editor of Caijing, a business magazine famed for its groundbreaking investigative reporting that has had a profound impact on China.
Its reports on illegal trading, “government cover-up of the true extent of the 2003 SARS epidemic”, and corporate fraud led to the ousting of high public officials, prosecution of business leaders, and stock market reforms, the foundation said. Another winner was Chinese lawyer Wang Canfa, 55, founder of the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims, which has handled thousands of environmental complaints and beaten powerful industrialists in court.
Also honoured were Indonesian anthropologist Saur Marlina Manurung, National Museum of Afghanistan director Omara Khan Masoudi, Filipino teacher Randy Halasan, and the Pakistani non-government group The Citizen’s Foundation.
