Oihana Goiriena ARGIA awarded for:

"This is a prize based on serious injustice. A journalist is going to spend a year in a cold prison in the north-west of Europe watching their fundamental rights being violated. A freelance, without the unequivocal support of a media or a state, faces this terrible situation almost in solitude.

'Before you explain something, the first thing you have to do is get yourself understood, if we don't go wrong.' This is what this old-school journalist said, before a perfect storm falls in half. Poland is kidnapped without trial and without substantiated evidence against it. And this communicator has been left incommunicado in the inability to defend himself publicly.

However, the friends and relatives of the area have not been crossed, and if today the case of Pablo González seems to us an injustice, the work they have done there has much to do with it. Especially those made by his wife. Since they entered prison, we have seen it in the big media as in the small, in the parliaments or in the cheesemaking. Wherever necessary, denouncing injustice, claiming her husband’s freedom, continually telling us what happened to the new hearings, transmitting strength and, above all, always with all dignity.

And by the way, defending journalism, remembering this trade that lately we see so obedient to economic and political elites that its beauty is in honesty. That without independent or free journalism there is no democracy, and that what is being done with Paul is an attack on all journalists."

Listen to the words of the award-winning:

Words of Oihana Goiriena after receiving the Argia de Mérito Award. To denounce the unjust imprisonment of her husband, journalist Pablo González, and to defend free journalism, we have been awarded for opening the issue to the four winds. @FreePablo Gonz #argiasariak pic.twitter.com/Es7rZaNerT

— ARGIA (@argia) January 27, 2023