Gabriella Jóźwiak - Freelance Journalist

My reporting of the Ebola virus outbreak in Liberia was recognised at the Amnesty International Media Awards last night, where I was handed the Gaby Rado Memorial Award. The articles published in the Sunday Times, the Observer and the Independent on Sunday sought to highlight the broader impact of the disease on already impoverished communities. The stories showed how people were dying not just from the virus itself, but from fear and as a result of the government and international community's inadequate response. They also highlighted the vital role local NGOs played in the response, particularly charity Street Child . My entry as presented at the awards ceremony by BBC world affairs correspondent Mike Thomson Part of my acceptance speech The Gaby Rado Memorial Award recognises the work of a journalist who has been covering human rights issues for less than five years. Click here for links to the winnin...

"Anyone would guess it was a prison. Its four-metre-high walls are topped with coiled barbed wire and punctuated with watchtowers. Its tall metal gates are locked. Yet a glimpse through one door, left slightly ajar, reveals its inmates died years ago. The site in Monrovia, Liberia's capital, is an abandoned cemetery where no one has been buried for decades. The walls aren't there to confine the dead, but to keep out the living – people whom Liberian society has forgotten who inhabit its crumbling tombs. "There was a body there, but I took it out and threw it away," says Junior Toe. A veteran tomb dweller, as those occupying the cemetery are known, he has lost count of his years living among the dead. Standing on the worn edge of an open tomb, he peers into his second-hand bedroom. The empty space, about two-metres deep, is finished with stained green tiles crossed by vines. "When you look for a tomb, the body can't be too fresh," he advises....