A LECTURE BY A PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: WHO ARE TODAY’S SLAVES?

5 April 2017 (Wednesday), Comenius University Auditorium, 1st floor, 6 Šafárik Square, Bratislava


16. 03. 2017 09.53 hod.
By: CU Public Relations Office

You are warmly invited to a lecture by a Pulitzer Prize winner. At 4 pm on 5 April 2017, Martha Mendoza will give a lecture in the Comenius University Auditorium on modern-day slavery.

It is necessary to register for this event here: http://uniba.sk/mendoza_eng/index.php.

(The lecture will be in English with interpretation into Slovak also being provided)

Human trafficking is happening in nearly every corner of the world. Thanks to reporting by journalists from the Associated Press, it has been possible to free more than 2000 enslaved people who were working in the Thai prawn industry. If the slaves wanted to rest, they were beaten with stingray tails. Death at the hands of the boat captains was also a great threat. Martha Mendoza will talk about the background to this story, which she and three other reporters covered for several years. Thanks to her series of articles, there was a change in legislation and in business practices in this area, and consumers all over the world were made aware of the issue.

Martha Mendoza works for the Associated Press agency. Her reports triggered several parliamentary debates on changes to the law and an investigation by the Pentagon, and even drew the attention of the White House. She was a member of a team of journalists whose work covering slavery in the Thai prawn industry led to the freeing of over 2000 men. For their work, the team was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2016. Mendoza also received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her work in on covering the massacre in the village of No Gun Ri at the beginning of the Korean War, where American soldiers murdered hundreds of civilians. She has written for the Associated Press from Silicon Valley, New York, New Mexico, and Mexico. Mendoza has taught at Stanford and Princeton Universities, and has been teaching at the University of California for more than a decade.