The International Press Club Award has been announced for Kashmiri journalist Asif Sultan, who has been in jail in occupied Kashmir for bringing forth facts.

A local journalist received the award on behalf of Asif Sultan in the United States.

Asif Sultan had exposed India’s state oppression in occupied Kashmir.

He was an assistant editor of an English magazine, Kashmir Narrator. India’s occupational police had shown him arrested on Aug 31, 2018, but his family said he had been kept in illegal detention for five days before the police released his picture.

The Indian Supreme Court has sought answers from the government on the timelines for lifting all restrictions in the occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the Kashmir Media Service had reported on Oct 25.

Also Read: Congressmen seek access for Congress members, foreign journalists to held Kashmir

The occupied territory was put under lockdown on August 5, when the Narendra Modi government scrapped the special status of the occupied Kashmir. All mobile, landline and internet services were snapped. Schools, colleges and offices were shut and curbs were put on movement on roads.

 “For wow many days do you want restrictions? It’s already over two months now. You have to come clear on this and you have to find out other methods,” a three-judge bench headed by Justice NV Ramana had asked during the hearing on petitions.

Micro-blogging website, Twitter has blocked around one million tweets of the accounts criticizing India for communication blackout in held Jammu and Kashmir after the Indian government asked the social media platform to do so, a report of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on Friday.

The CPJ globally works for empowerment of media.

The investigation conducted by the journalists’ organisation revealed that hundreds of thousands of tweets had been blocked in India since August 2017, under the company’s country withheld content policy for accounts that focus on Kashmir.