Guest article by Andrea Römmele. Students choose Turkish journalist Canan Coşkun.
Andrea Römmele, Professor for Communication in Politics & Civil Society, was on the 2016 Handelsblatt jury which selected the “People of the Year”. Once again, Hertie School students were also asked to elect the “Person of the Year” in a school-wide online vote, which was organized by the online student magazine The Governance Post. Their choice: Canan Coşkun, a journalist for Turkish daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, whose investigation into alleged corruption by Turkish judicial officials has her facing 23 years in prison.
Governance Post editors wrote the laudations for their people of the year, which also included their second and third choices, Yusra Mardini and Jan Albrecht (respectively). Mardini is an 18-year-old Syrian refugee and Olympic swimmer who saved lives in the Mediterranean Sea and competed in the Rio 2016 Olympics. Albrecht, who is 33, is one of the youngest representatives in the European Parliament and its rapporteur on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation as well as on the EU-US data protection framework agreement.
The same Handelsblatt issue features an article by Andrea Römmele about Michelle Obama.
Andrea Römmele’s piece about Michelle Obama is available for here (in German).
Governance Post Editor Lisa Gow’s piece about Canan Coşkun can be found here (English and German).
Johanna Buchholz and Tanya Shoshan’s article about Yusra Mardini and Jan Albrecht can be found here (English and German).