Al Jazeera’s Emmy-nominated immersive storytelling and media innovation unit, AJ Contrast, has won a prestigious Amnesty Media Award. The awards, hosted by Amnesty International, annually recognise excellence in human rights reporting.
AJ Contrast beat The Guardian and two other Al Jazeera finalists to win “Best Use of Digital Media” for its long-form interactive, Living in the Unknown, during a virtual webcast from London on Wednesday. The interactive site has previously garnered other accolades, including a 2020 Online Journalism Award for Excellence in Visual Digital Storytelling. The site follows up the 2018 virtual reality documentary by the same name.
Living in the Unknown brings us into the daily routines of four Uighur women who fled state-sponsored persecution in northwestern China and are now rebuilding their lives in Istanbul, Turkey. But this is no usual exile, as any contact with their families back home could land them in internment camps in China’s Xinjiang p
As Ugandan presidential elections this week are rocked by accusations of vote rigging, and with the pop star turned legislator Bobi Wine (real name Robert Kyagulanyi) under house arrest, GQ looks back to when we travelled to the country to expose the corruption, culture and politics surrounding the often violent oppression of homosexuality. This piece was shortlist for an Amnesty Media Award.
There must be no distinguishable markings on the outside of the building. Nothing indicative of what happens within.
The room is airless and empty. Michael Bashaija slumps between his boyfriend – an older man named Apollo – and a lawyer, knees wide apart, on a green plastic garden chair that is cracked and worn. The only other -furniture in the room is an old, chipped wooden desk, a printer and a cork notice board, at the centre of which a more hopeful soul has made a palm-sized heart out of red pins. It burns like a single poppy in a ploughed field.