The Charlemagne Medal honors a personality or institution that has rendered services to European unification and the formation of a European identity. This year the award goes to "Australian European" Clark and a Ukrainian newsroom.
The historian Christopher Clark was awarded the Charlemagne Medal in Aachen. The Board of Trustees of the "Médaille Charlemagne" association recognized him as one of the most important chroniclers of recent European history. The "Australian European", who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2015, is a professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge. His most famous work is the study "The Sleepwalkers" from 2012, in which he explains how the great European powers slid into the First World War in 1914.
The statement of the Board of Trustees states: "His books, lectures and last but not least his TV productions create an understanding of the social conditions in Europe in the 21st century, which nowadays are all too often taken for granted and whose value we have lost through the war in Eastern Europe was so impressively recalled."
The reporting by the online medium "The Kyiv Independent" during the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine received a special award. "The impressive quality of the journalistic work under the most difficult conditions and the courageous commitment of the employees, which is often associated with a risk to their own lives, are of essential importance for the independent information from the crisis area and the forthcoming processing of the events." , so the reasoning.
Since 2000, the Charlemagne Medal has been awarded to a European personality or institution that has made a special contribution to the process of European unification and the development of a European identity in the field of media. Previous winners have included the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw and the former WDR director Fritz Pleitgen.
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