Myanmar photojournalist Sai Zaw Thaike wins CPJ Press Freedom award while serving 20-Year prison sentence

Myanmar Now photojournalist Sai Zaw Thaike will receive the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) 2026 International Press Freedom Award, the New York-based press rights watchdog announced on 5 August, alongside journalists from five other countries who have faced imprisonment, exile and surveillance for their reporting. CPJ will present the awards at its 36th annual gala in New York on 19 November, chaired by NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde, with New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro serving as master of ceremonies. “They have endured targeting, imprisonment, exile, and surveillance for simply reporting the news,” CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg said of this year’s honorees. CPJ’s other 2026 honorees include Christina Assi, a photojournalist for Agence France-Presse (AFP) injured in a 2023 Israeli strike at the Lebanon-Israel border that killed her colleague, Reuters correspondent Issam Abdallah; the Eritrea 16, a group of journalists arrested in a 2001 crackdown on independent media, some of whom remain jailed without charge or trial 25 years on; Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist charged with espionage this year after exposing the foreign minister’s ties to the Kremlin; and Estefany Rodríguez, a Colombian-born reporter in Tennessee detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in March after covering immigration raids in Nashville, despite living in the country legally. Separately, Salvadoran journalist Carlos Dada, who co-founded the digital outlet El Faro in 1998 and now leads its newsroom in exile from Costa Rica, will receive CPJ’s Gwen Ifill Press Freedom Award, given annually for an individual’s sustained commitment to press freedom. CPJ Board Chair Jacob Weisberg said Dada’s newsroom continues investigative reporting despite the erosion of press freedom under El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. Sai Zaw Thaike was arrested on 23 May 2023 while covering the aftermath of Cyclone Mocha in Sittwe, where the storm killed many members of the persecuted Rohingya minority. A military tribunal sentenced him that September to 20 years with hard labour in Yangon’s Insein Prison, one of the longest known journalism-related sentences since the military ousted Myanmar’s elected government in the 2021 coup. CPJ said he has been subjected to physical abuse and torture, and denied medical treatment for serious ailments, while imprisoned. Myanmar was ranked the world’s second-worst jailer of journalists in CPJ’s 2025 prison census, with 30 documented cases – a record CPJ said reflects the military regime’s campaign to jail journalists and silence critical coverage. The post Myanmar photojournalist Sai Zaw Thaike wins CPJ Press Freedom award while serving 20-Year prison sentence appeared first on ENG.MIZZIMA.COM.