Ms Salima GHEZALI, Algeria, Journalist, writer and women’s rights activist, Winner of the 1997 Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought

Salima Ghezali is an Algerian journalist, writer and women's rights activist. In the 1980s she became involved in the Algerian women's movement, amongst other things as a founder member of Women of Europe and the Maghreb and as editor-in-chief of NYSSA, the women's publication she herself founded. A teacher turned journalist, she edited the French-language Algerian weekly La Nation from 1994, the most widely-read weekly in Algeria. The paper was seized and suspended many times, and finally banned in 1996, after the appearance in Le Monde Diplomatique of Ghezali's report on the human rights situation in Algeria. The publication of La Nation resumed in 2011 on the Internet.  Salima Ghezali has won a range of human rights awards and continues her activism on women's rights, human rights and democracy in Algeria. In 1997 she was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.