Mr President, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Today, the 4th of June, is the 18th anniversary of the violent, murderous suppression of a peaceful demonstration for democracy on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Even today, most Chinese know nothing about what happened that day. The Communist regime continues to prevent the Chinese media from talking and writing about it openly and honestly and will go to great lengths to silence any such revelations and to severely punish those who make them.

Shi Tao, whom we are honouring here today, has learned this to his own great cost. He revealed what the state did not want known and he pays the price in prison today.

As the world prepares for the Beijing Olympics next year, it is important to remember that China is not just sport, tourism and double-digit economic growth. Here in Africa, where China has been conducting an aggressive charm campaign, it is especially important to present the full, rounded picture. And to demand change.

For China is not only an economic powerhouse. It jails more journalists, cyber-dissidents, human rights activists and others courageous enough to speak out against widespread abuses than any other country in the world.

Some people argue that digital communications such as internet and email make totalitarian government harder to preserve. But it is also true that such communications are very transparent and easy to monitor. As Shi Tao could tell you.

Three years ago, Mr Shi wrote an e-mail to overseas Chinese web sites that contained government instructions to the media on how they must cover the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. For this act, he was jailed for ten years for leaking - and I quote - "state secrets" .

How the Chinese authorities traced this e-mail, and discovered that Shi Tao was the author, is a cautionary tale with widespread implications for on-line privacy, and for the way that western communications companies do business in their understandably difficult dealings with repressive regimes.

Mr Shi’s e-mail was picked up by Chinese authorities with the assistance of Yahoo. The internet service provider gave state security authorities information that allowed them to trace the message to a computer he used at the newspaper where he worked, Contemporary Business News.

Yahoo has argued that it must comply with the laws in the countries where it operates, and was therefore compelled to cooperate with state security authorities. And while those who do business around the globe must often deal with non-democratic governments, we believe that new media companies that provide more and more of the means for global communications, have a special responsibility. They have an obligation to ensure that the basic human rights of their users will be protected, and they must carefully guard against becoming accomplices in repression.

The Chinese government classifies a wide range of innocuous or potentially embarrassing materials as "state secrets" in an attempt to control the flow of information to its citizens and to the outside world. To describe the information that Shi Tao publicised as "state secrets" is self-evidently absurd. It was information about censorship orders given out to the media by the Propaganda Department instructing them on how they should cover the anniversary of the Tiananmen events.

Mr Shi knew the risks he was taking by publicising the information -- dozens of journalists and cyber-dissidents languish in Chinese jails for similar actions -- yet he nevertheless made the courageous decision to disseminate this information. I would like to think that any professional reporter in a democracy would do the same, and Mr Shi serves as an inspiration to all of us.

It wasn’t the first time that Mr Shi, who is 38 years old, has published information that pushed the limits of what can be said in China. Before his imprisonment, he had published numerous essays and political commentaries relating to social problems in China on pro-democracy websites.

Mr Shi, a poet as well as a journalist, began his writing career as a teen-ager, He studied political economics and graduated with a degree in political education from East China Normal University in Shanghai, where he started a poetry society. He worked as a reporter, editor and division director at several newspapers, joining the Contemporary Business News in 2004 as an editorial director and assistant to its Chief Editor. He resigned from the paper in May 2004 to become a freelance journalist and was arrested six months later.

Today’s award to Shi Tao has already provoked the ire of the Chinese authorities. The official China Newspaper Association has demanded that we withdraw this award, claiming that the Chinese court "handled the case according to law and made the appropriate sentence" and that the Chinese constitution protects press freedom.

We are not impressed by this argument. If the law makes it possible to send a journalist to jail in such a case, the law should be abolished immediately since it contradicts every conceivable international standard and convention on freedom of information and human rights.

As for the claim that the Chinese constitution protects freedom of speech, this guarantee is nothing more than a mere fiction. Such freedoms simply do not exist in China. Indeed, if they did, Shi Tao would not be in prison today, nor would dozens of other journalists.

In making this award today, the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum once again call on the Chinese government to release Shi Tao and other jailed journalists. We will soon be launching a campaign to keep these cases in the forefront of news coverage, and on the agenda of international sports organisations and governmental and intergovernmental meetings, in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics.

Ladies and gentlemen, although Shi Tao could not be with us today to accept his award, we have someone very close to him here and we are extremely pleased to welcome her. Gao Qinsheng, the mother of Shi Tao, has come here from China, at great personal risk, to accept the award on behalf of her son. I would ask you to stand and applaud mother and son for their courage as we present the 2007 Golden Pen of Freedom to jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao.