2021 Judges (25th Edition)

Allan Au Ka-lun is a columnist for Mingpao and Professional Consultant at the School of Journalism & Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, as well as a former producer, editor, and host at TVB News.

Angela Lee is a former board member of Amnesty International Hong Kong and has acted as a judge for the Awards since its inception in 1996.

Au Mei Po is an activist. She has been campaigning for gender equality and defending labour rights and human rights locally and internationally in the last two decades. She was the director of Amnesty International Hong Kong between 2011 and 2018. During her terms, she initiated Adhere to Righteousness — 20 Years of Human Rights Press Awards, a book project on the 20th anniversary of Human Rights Press Awards.

Bettina Wassener spent 20 years working as a business and economics correspondent, for the Financial Times and the New York Times/International Herald Tribune among others. Based in Hong Kong since 2008, she now works in corporate PR.

Chong Yiu-kwong is a solicitor and a senior lecturer at the Department of Education Policy and Leadership of The Education University of Hong Kong.

Divya Gopalan is a Hong Kong-based journalist with more than 20 years of experience in international news. She has worked, and continues to work, as a news anchor in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, having been deployed in 17 different countries. A seasoned professional, Divya understands all aspects of broadcast journalism, both in front and behind the cameras. She also contributes to online news outlets for breaking news and feature reports.

Douglas Wong is an editor at Bloomberg Intelligence and was previously a journalist at Bloomberg News, the Financial Times and The Straits Times. A former FCC president and treasurer, he has been an HRPA judge since 2012.

Eric Poon is a veteran producer who has made more than 100 documentaries for Radio Television Hong Kong since 1993. Mr. Poon is an associate professor of practice at the School of Journalism & Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Fung Wai-kong has been the editorial writer of Apple Daily since 1997. He is currently the Managing Editor of Apple Daily (English) and a columnist of CitizenNews.

Geoffrey Yeung is a barrister developing a practice in constitutional and administrative law, human rights law, discrimination law, as well as general civil and criminal work. He graduated from the University of Hong Kong, and pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Geoffrey is also an advocate for LGBT rights and welfare in Hong Kong, focusing on law and policy issues.

Icarus Wong Ho-yin is a human rights campaigner and the founder of Civil Rights Observer. He earned a Master of Laws in Human Rights from the University of Hong Kong in 2017. He has been actively involved in advocating human rights protection against police brutality at both local level and the United Nations since 2009. Icarus is also known for his advocacy against inequality and adverse impacts brought by urban redevelopment.

Isabella Ng is the Assistant Professor and the Associate Head (Teaching and Learning) in the Department of Asian and Policy Studies, The Education University of Hong Kong. She is the founder of The Hong Kong Society for Asylum-seekers and Refugees. Before teaching, she worked as a reporter for Time magazine, covering Greater China region.

Jason Y. Ng is a bestselling author, a columnist and an adjunct associate law professor. He co-authored Unfree Speech, Joshua Wong’s memoir to be released by Penguin UK later this month. Ng is also an activist, currently serving as convener of the Progressive Lawyers Group and previously as president of PEN Hong Kong. In 2018, he was among eight human rights activists honoured at the Movies That Matter human rights film festival in The Hague.

Jayne Russell has worked as a press photographer for over 35 years having travelled extensively following world events. She has also spent time as a Picture Editor at both international photo agencies and newspapers across the globe. Having worked on human rights photo projects before, she understands the importance of photos to getting world attention.

Jim Laurie has been a journalist and broadcaster for 50 years. He heads Focus Asia Productions, a video and television consultancy firm. He serves as an outside consultant to a number of television and digital media organisations. Jim covered the war in Vietnam for NBC News (1972-1975), opened the first television bureau in Beijing for ABC News (1981), and served as President of the FCC Hong Kong 2001-02. His new book “THE LAST HELICOPTER: Two Lives in Indochina” (2020) chronicles his experiences as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam (1970 to 1980).

Jonathan Hopfner is a partner at New Narrative. He is a former Reuters News editor.

Juliana Liu is senior editor at Inkstone, an award-winning daily multimedia online magazine focusing on China-related stories. Before founding Inkstone, which is a unit of the South China Morning Post, she was the BBC’s Hong Kong Correspondent from 2012 to 2017. Before that, she had a variety of international on-air roles with BBC News. She started her journalistic career as a Beijing Correspondent at Reuters. She is also the immediate past president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Hong Kong.

Karen Kong is a Principal Lecturer of the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong and Deputy Director of the LLM in Human Rights Programme at the University of Hong Kong. She teaches and researches in the area of socio-economic rights, public interest litigation, constitutional law and administrative law.

Leung Mee Ping is a professor of art creativity at the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University.

Lo Yan Wai is a veteran journalist. She is the Director-producer of “Vanished Archives”, a documentary of the Hong Kong 1967 riots. Lo served as a principal producer for “Sunday Report” at HKTVB and headed Public Affairs Department in Vancouver Fairchild Television Newsroom. She has founded Studio for Public Humanities Limited since 2012 with a documentation focus in the history of Hong Kong. Her articles are published in various media.

Mikko Takkunen is a photo editor at The New York Times’s International desk in Hong Kong. Before joining the Times in 2015, Takkunen was the International Photo Editor at Time.com in New York. Originally from Finland, Takkunen lived in the UK for over 10 years, where he did two university degrees and later worked as a freelance photographer in London.

Poon Siu-to is a veteran journalist. He is a public affairs host of Commercial Radio.

Robert Godden is co-founder and Executive Director at Rights Exposure, an award-winning international consultancy providing solutions for positive social change. Before establishing Rights Exposure, he worked in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Amnesty International, based in London, Kathmandu, and Hong Kong.

Robin Moyer’s photography career spans five decades, mostly in Asia. He was Time Magazine’s chief photographer (Asia), based in Hong Kong and Manila for nearly 25 years. He was awarded World Press Photo Picture of the Year and the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Citation for Courage and Enterprise for his work during the war in Lebanon in 1982. He is currently producing a series of hand made platinum prints and gathering material from his archive for a new book of his photographs.

Sham Yee-lan was the chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association between 2013 and 2017. She is a veteran journalist. She served as the Deputy Chief Editor of the Hong Kong Economic Times, Deputy Publisher of iMoney Magazine and Executive Chief Editor of Apple.com.

Shirley Yam has been a financial and political journalist since the 80s. She was the vice-chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association between 2011 and 2020.

Professor Simon Chu, former Director of the Hong Kong Government Records Service, was educated in Canada and the UK where he obtained his degrees in History, Archival Science and Law. Professor CHU has held executive positions in UNESCO’s Committees for the Memory of the World Program and is at the moment the Program’s Special Advisor for its Asia Pacific Committee and the National Committee of China. Professor CHU is currently teaching history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Archival Science at Hong Kong University. He is a Fellow of the International Council on Archives (ICA) and the winner of the 2019 Emmett Leahy Award.

Tripti Lahiri is Asia bureau chief for Quartz, a US online news site known for its coverage of transformations in the global economy. Based in Hong Kong, she oversees a team focusing largely on China-related coverage. Before that, she was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal. She’s also the author of “Maid in India,” a book about the economics and culture of having help in India’s capital.

Tze-wei Ng’s career spans journalism, NGO and law, with a focus on human rights and development. She was Beijing correspondent for the South China Morning Post 2006-2012, where she mainly covered law and foreign affairs, winning multiple awards for her reporting. After which she joined the NGO sector leading a number of organisations and initiatives, including founding the Hong Kong office and Asia regional program of PILnet: The Global Network for Public Interest Law. Since 2019, she resumed working as a corporate lawyer, specialised in serving charities, social innovators and investors who are impact and ESG-minded.

Venus Cheng is a trustee of Amnesty International Hong Kong Section Human Rights Education Charitable Trust. She was an ExCo member of Amnesty International Hong Kong between 2006 and 2019 and the vice-chairperson during 2009-13. By profession, Venus is a communications and public affairs specialist and consultant in NGO governance.