Rainer Rehak and Stella Assange
This year, the Weizenbaum Award for Peace and Social Responsibility will be given to Julian Assange. Assange is an outstanding journalist who, through the founding of Wikileaks (a digital anonymous whistle-blowing platform), has shown how creative use of technology can be used to expose structures of power. In doing so, he has helped expose, among other things, covered-up US war crimes, brazen lies by politicians about state torture, and high-profile NSA secret documents about the surveillance of EU citizens. He has been subjected to systematic torture by the UK and the US for years. He is currently in danger of being extradited to the USA, which would cause great damage to Assange personally as well as to the freedom of the press as a whole. Assange is therefore honored by the FIfF for his merits and his courage.
