Al Jazeera English wins CINE Gold Eagle Award

Fault Lines – Haiti by Force: UN Sex Abuse, an Al Jazeera English documentary that investigates an epidemic of rape by United Nations security forces in Haiti, has won a CINE Gold Eagle Award.

The documentary, which first broadcast in March of 2017, exposed the scope of a decade of sexual abuse by peacekeepers in Haiti. With evidence of mishandling and cover ups at every stage, Al Jazeera English’s Femi Oke brought the findings to the highest levels of United Nations and demanded why few survivors received even the most basic forms of justice in the years after the attacks.

The CINE Golden Eagle Awards were founded in 1957 and honour originality and excellence in storytelling. “Fault Lines – Haiti by Force: UN Sex Abuse” was judged the best non-fiction short documentary. Past winners of the Golden Eagle Awards include Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Michael Moore, Martin Scorsese, and Robert De Niro. 

The crew behind “Fault Lines – Haiti by Force: UN Sex Abuse” traversed the island nation, uncovering several cases of unrecorded rape in one isolated province. The filmmakers investigated the number of unreported cases and whether UN officials have properly changed their protocols to prevent future mishandling.  In their own words, survivors were given a rare platform to reflect on these questions and how their lives may have been different if the crimes were properly managed.

The award-winning Fault Lines strand premiered in 2009 and examines the United States role in world affairs.

Other Al Jazeera English content named as finalists in the 61st CINE Golden Eagle Awards are: 

·         Talk to Al Jazeera in the Field: ISIL Slept in our Home, in which correspondent Hoda Abdel Hamid spoke to Iraqis whose town had been invaded by ISIL;

·         People and Power - Inside Syria’s War: Arms and Resistance in Jobar, a two part series that documented life in a Damascus neighborhood at the frontlines of fighting between government forces and rebels;

·         Al Jazeera Correspondent – The Cut: Exploring FGM, which examined the modern practice of female genital mutilation in societies across the world.