The National Press Club will honor the nation's best journalism and recognize the courageous work of journalists who report despite extraordinary hardship at an awards dinner Tuesday, Aug. 6.

The John Aubuchon Press Freedom Awards (establised by the National Press Club) were this year given to ANF journalist Zeynep Kuray, and the anonymous "whistleblowers" who expose wrongdoing at their own peril.

Kuray, said the National Press Club in its statemente "writes for a daily newspaper and a news agency in Istanbul, is known for writing about controversial issues, including the conflict between Turkey's government and its Kurdish minority. She was arrested and dozens of her colleagues were arrested in December 2011 for allegedly working as "propagandists" for an outlawed Kurdish political organization. Human rights groups accuse Turkish authorities for using the arrests to crack down on Kurdish dissent".

Arrested in December 2011, Zeynep Kuray is one of the 44 journalists dubbed the KCK ‘press wing’ currently on trial in Turkey. She is charged with ‘membership of an armed organisation’ under Article 314/2 of the Turkish Penal Code and ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’ under Article 5 of the Anti-Terror Law. The indictment against her shows no evidence of material links to "violence" or the plotting of violent acts, instead making references to telephone conversations she had with other journalists, articles she wrote about the alleged sexual harassment of female Turkish Airlines employees, and an investigative piece questioning whether chemical weapons had been used against PKK guerrillas by the Turkish army.

During her initial hearing on 12 September 2012, Kuray and her co-defendants asked to be able to defend themselves in Kurdish, a request that was rejected by the court. Shortly afterwards, detained KCK suspects announced a hunger strike; amongst their stated demands were the right to defend oneself in one’s mother tongue, native language education, and improved conditions for imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan. Zeynep Kuray was one of over 700 participants in the 68-day hunger strike, which ended on 18 November 2012 and is seen to have been instrumental in the passing of a new law which allows Kurdish defendants to speak their mother tongue in court. At the following hearing, which began on Monday 22 April 2013, Kuray and her co-defendants were allowed to defend themselves in Kurdish for the first time.

Ahead of the hearing in April 2013, 26 of the journalists on trial, including Zeynep Kuray, remained detained in prison facilities in Istanbul. On 26 April, the court ruled that just two of those journalists – Zeynep Kuray and Sadık Topaloğlu – would be released pending trial.