Mr. Mohamed Fahmy
Former English Bureau Chief
Al Jazeera, Egypt Office
will be addressing the Vancouver Institute on October 31, 2015 at 8:15 p.m., Lecture Hall No. 2 in the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre, University of British Columbia.
Mr. Fahmy is an award-winning journalist and author. He covered the Iraq war in 2003 for the Los Angeles Times, and published Baghdad Bound based on his experiences. He has done extensive work in the Middle East for CNN, Dubai TV, and Foreign Policy. In 2011, he received the Peabody award for his coverage of the Arab Spring and the Tom Renner Investigative Reporting Award for producing the documentary Death in the Desert. In 2013 he accepted the title of Al Jazeera English Bureau Chief in Egypt, where he was arrested along with two other Al Jazeera English journalists. Mr. Fahmy was sentenced to seven years of incarceration, but was granted a retrial and release in June of 2015 but reconvicted in August of this year. Earlier this year, he founded the Fahmy Foundation for Free Press to help journalists imprisoned world-wide. In 2014 he received the Canadian Commission World Press Freedom Award and a certificate from UNESCO.
(These references were compiled by the webmaster in the hope that they will prove interesting to some readers. The web being what it is, some of them will have vanished by the time you go to look them up, and there is—of course—no guarantee of their accuracy.)
Although concern was expressed in the Institute's printed brochure as to whether Mr. Fahmy would be released from prison in Egypt in time to give this presentation, he has been released, and indeed pardoned, and is now in Vancouver.
