Toronto – Journalists for Human Rights is delighted to announce that journalist and author, Rodney D. Sieh, is our newest Ambassador.
JHR selects Ambassadors on the basis of their journalistic commitment to excellence and approach to human rights reporting. Sieh joins Karyn Pugliese of Ryerson University and APTN, Lisa LaFlamme of CTV, JHR Board Chair Michael Cooke of the Toronto Star and others.
Sieh is the 2016-2017 Gordon N. Fisher / JHR Fellow at Massey College, Toronto, Canada, part of the William Southam Journalism Fellowship. He is the editor and publisher of Liberia’s largest independent print and online daily, where ground-breaking reporting has brought down senior government figures and exposed corruption at all levels.
A graduate in media studies from Hunter College in New York City, Sieh has won a number of awards including Journalist of the Year and Media House of the Year in Liberia.
In 2014, he was named by Reporters Without Borders as one of its 100 ‘Information Heroes’, and FrontPageAfrica the recipient of a TV5Monde Prize for Press Freedom.
In 2019, he received the X- International Press Freedom Prize, presented in Malaga, Spain.
Since 2009, Rodney’s newspaper FrontPageAfrica has been heavily involved with Journalists for Human Rights, which trains journalists so they can use traditional reporting skills to cover human rights and other important issues in their communities.
His team of reporters learned the basics about human rights journalism which propelled Mae Azango, one of the few women journalist in the country into an internationally-renowned journalist whose reporting on female genital mutilation brought global attention to the cruel ritual, eventually forcing the government to act.
The newspaper has been successful in reporting stories about prostitution, striking mineral workers, poverty – stories that had never been covered by other Liberian publications whose staff regularly accepted bribes from politicians.
Front Page Africa did such an effective job of exposing human rights violations and corruption that Rodney was sent to prison on a trumped-up libel charge. In August 2013 FrontPageAfrica shut down due to his failure to pay a libel award of $1.5 million won by a former government minister who sued Rodney Sieh and his paper after the publication of a government audit.
The court said if he couldn’t pay the fine – and he couldn’t – then the sentence would be converted to an appropriate amount of time, thus, the ruling: 5,000 years. International outcry by human rights organizations, including JHR, Human Rights Watch, Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders and his Op-ed in the New York Times, forced the Liberian government to release him after five months.