Time/Date - Saturday June 18, 6-7:30 pm
Venue - Amnesty International Asia-Pacific Regional
Office, 16/F Siu On Centre, 188 Lockhart Road, Wanchai
Speaker:
Steven Gan, founder and publisher of "Malaysiakini"
Language - the talk will be in English.
Many of the news items on human rights in Malaysia that I have been
posting to this group come from "Malaysiakini", Malaysia's only
independent news source.
Steven Gan, founder and publisher of "Malaysiakini" is based in Kuala Lumpur but will be in Hong Kong next weekend, and has kindly agreed
to speak to AI members and supporters on press freedom in Malaysia.
Do come along if you can - Steven is a very interesting person
and "Malaysiakini" has been a valuable source of news about human
rights in Malaysia since it was founded in 1999. And please alert any
of your other contacts who might be interested.
Below is some information about Steven Gan and "Malaysiakini"
Steven spent four years as a Hong Kong-based freelance journalist,
travelling extensively around Asia and covering the first Gulf War
from Baghdad. He was appointed special issues editor for Malaysian
newspaper "The Sun" in 1994 and also wrote a weekly column, 'Thursday
with Steven Gan', where he had to frequently battle the paper's
internal censors.
In 1995, he helped break a story on the deaths of 59 inmates at the
Semenyih immigration detention camp. He gave the information to human
rights activist Irene Fernandez when The Sun refused to publish the
story. (Fernandez was subsequently charged by the government with
spreading "false news").
In 1996, Steven was adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of
conscience after he was arrested at the Asia-Pacific Conference on
East Timor (Apcet II); he was released after five days in prison.
His last column on the Apcet II fracas was spiked by his editor and
he resigned from the paper in protest soon after. He joined "The
Nation" in Bangkok and was one of the newspaper's editorial writers
for two years before co-founding Malaysiakini (Malaysia Now) with
fellow journalist Premesh Chandran.
Since it went live in 1999, Malaysiakini has become one of the top
news websites in the country. The site receives 50,000 unique
vistors daily. Malaysiakini received the Free Media Pioneer award
from the Vienna-based International Press Institute in 2001, and
Steven is a recipient of New York-based Committee to Protect
Journalists' International Press Freedom Award 2000.
The online website is ranked 18 on Asiaweek's Power 50 (2001), and
Steven was selected as one of the 50 most influential individuals in
Business Week's `Stars of Asia' (2002) as well as Asia Inc's `Who's
hot in Asia?' (2004).