Free Media Awards 2024
Larysa Shchyrakova – Belarus

She is currently being held as a political prisoner. Despite the threat of arrest earlier, she continued working as a journalist. In autumn 2023, she was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison in Belarus on a trumped up charge. It was alleged that she had discredited Belarus and facilitated extremism, ostensibly by spreading disinformation online. As a freelance journalist, Larysa Shchyrakova turned the spotlight on the forgotten victims of Stalin’s oppression. She made the documentary ‘The Murdered and Forgotten’, in which she documented the stories told by the relatives of oppressed dissidents. Larysa Shchyrakova has been a mainstay for freelance journalists in the Homiel region, and she has worked tenaciously at the international level to try to make it legal to work as a freelance journalist in Belarus. She herself was the first freelance journalist in Belarus to be fined for allegedly “working for foreign media”. Larysa Shchyrakova courageously covered how Belarus dealt with the pandemic and the protests in its wake.