Press Seminar The Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism
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OTHER European Parliament
Pina Picierno
E ogni anno le sfide che noi ci troviamo qui ad affrontare, perché ogni anno ormai da qualche anno ci ritroviamo a discutere insieme delle sfide che riguardano il giornalismo libero, che riguardano la libertà di stampa, ma che riguardano anche le istituzioni europee, ecco ogni anno le sfide che abbiamo in comune si moltiplicano. Nemici nuovi eppure nemici antichi cercano di insidiare quelli che sono i beni più preziosi delle nostre società e cioè lo stato di diritto, la libertà, la democrazia, che sono, badate, lo voglio sottolineare ancora una volta, elementi inseparabili che sono oggi sottoposti ad una pressione enorme da parte di regimi autoritari, da parte di autocrazie che mirano a indebolire non soltanto le istituzioni europee, ma anche quello che è il tessuto di libertà dei nostri paesi, delle nostre democrazie.
Vorrei che questo anche fosse oggetto delle vostre riflessioni del nostro lavoro comune in cui la libertà di informazione sotto attacco da un sacco di fronti, interferenze straniere, manipolazioni, campagne coordinate di disinformazione, intimidazioni, tentativi di delegittimare chi esercita il diritto, ma anche il dovere di informare. E queste strategie, se ci pensate, hanno un obiettivo preciso: non quello di convincere, quello di confondere, quello di erodere la fiducia dei cittadini perché non si limitano a diffondere notizie false, no, le cosiddette fake news, ma mirano a indebolire la fiducia dei cittadini nella possibilità stessa di distinguere i fatti dalla menzogna, la realtà dalla propaganda. Il problema allora che noi dobbiamo porci non è soltanto stabilire che cosa sia vero e cosa sia falso. Il problema è che un numero sempre maggiore di cittadini viene spinto a credere che una verità condivisa non esista più, che ogni fonte possa essere sospetta e che ogni informazione possa equivalere ad un'opinione.
Ed è precisamente in questo vuoto che prosperano le strategie di destabilizzazione, perché una società che è incapace di riconoscere i fatti diventa più vulnerabile e più vulnerabile alla manipolazione. Per questo la qualità dell'informazione è diventata sempre di più una questione, la questione più importante, io credo, che riguarda la sicurezza europea. Per troppo tempo noi abbiamo considerato la disinformazione una questione marginale, quasi un effetto collaterale dell'innovazione, no, dell'innovazione tecnologica, dei social media, dei canali di comunicazione. Oggi sappiamo che non è assolutamente così. Sappiamo che la disinformazione è uno strumento deliberato, organizzato e sostenuto da attori statali, da attori parastatali che operano con continuità e che mettono a disposizione di questo obiettivo, che è l'obiettivo poi di destabilizzare le nostre democrazie, risorse molto molto significative.
Sacco di soldi. Un sacco di soldi.
E allora la risposta nostra, la risposta istituzionale del Parlamento, delle istituzioni europee, lo sapete, è già in movimento. Il Parlamento europeo ha lavorato, ne abbiamo parlato anche l'anno scorso, alla commissione speciale che è la commissione per il Democracy Shield e lavoriamo appunto per rafforzare la capacità e la resilienza del nostro continente rispetto alle interferenze straniere, lavoriamo per proteggere i processi elettorali, per difendere la libertà dei media. La Commissione europea ha annunciato uno stanziamento di 5 milioni di euro e una rete europea di fact-checker. Sono senza dubbio passi importanti, ma noi dobbiamo essere tutti consapevoli, voi per primi, che la costruzione della difesa dello spazio informativo richiede continuità, richiede risorse adeguate e richiede una strategia comune tra voi, che siete appunto la difesa migliore per il nostro spazio democratico e per la qualità dell'informazione perché fate i giornalisti, e noi come istituzioni europee.
Naturalmente la difficoltà che rimane è una difficoltà politica perché ogni intervento, io con voi voglio affrontare questa questione perché vedete ogni volta che io mi trovo a combattere la disinformazione, lo faccio ogni giorno, ogni volta mi trovo di fronte ad una domanda che a un certo punto mi viene posta: dove finisce la difesa della democrazia e dove comincia il rischio di limitarla? Perché mi dicono: ah tu vuoi per esempio no limitare la libertà di opinione di chi esprime o di chi si esprime per esempio in eventi di propaganda no? Io mi occupo per esempio in Italia ma in tutti i paesi dell'Unione di come dire limitare, di far cancellare, di rendere impossibile la possibilità che eventi di propaganda per esempio putiniana si possano svolgere sul nostro territorio. E un attimo dopo mi arriva: ah tu vuoi sei una che vuole silenziare le opinioni dei cittadini. E allora guardate io ve la pongo proprio chiara la domanda a cui dobbiamo dare una risposta insieme: dove finisce la difesa della democrazia e dove comincia il rischio di limitarla?
È una domanda legittima a cui tutti noi insieme noi dobbiamo rispondere con rigore, perché la lotta alla disinformazione non può diventare un pretesto per censurare il dissenso, ovviamente. Non può diventare il pretesto per attribuire alle istituzioni il potere di stabilire una verità ufficiale. Non stiamo discutendo di questo. Ma questo principio, però, e questi principi sacrosanti non possono trasformarsi nell'alibi per lasciare che la manipolazione cognitiva prosperi in maniera indisturbata. Perché uno spazio pubblico in cui prevalgono opacità, intimidazioni, campagne orchestrate da autocrazie, da dittature, non è più uno spazio libero.
Non lo è più. È uno spazio che è diventato fragile. È uno spazio che è diventato vulnerabile. Allora difendere la libertà di espressione significa difendere e proteggere le condizioni che rendono quella libertà effettiva. Significa alcune cose.
Significa trasparenza delle piattaforme digitali, che non c'è.
Significa responsabilità di chi le gestisce, che non c'è. Significa tracciabilità delle campagne coordinate e anche capacità delle istituzioni di riconoscere e di contrastare le interferenze, naturalmente nel rispetto dello stato di diritto e dei diritti fondamentali. E c'è un altro nodo, vado più veloce perché non voglio prendere troppo tempo perché voglio ascoltare Vera soprattutto e poi tutti voi. C'è un altro nodo che noi non possiamo eludere: la crisi strutturale del giornalismo. Senza un sistema dei media indipendente, economicamente sostenibile, professionalmente solido, ogni strategia di difesa democratica resta incompleta, perché un giornalismo impoverito, un giornalismo precario e costretto a inseguire la velocità a scapito della verifica è certamente più esposto a condizionamenti, a pressioni politiche, a pressioni economiche ed è anche meno attrezzato a svolgere la propria funzione pubblica.
Perché la disinformazione, care amiche e amici, non si combatte soltanto rimuovendo i contenuti falsi. Si combatte soprattutto rafforzando i contenuti veri.
Questo è il punto. Rendendo più visibili, più centrali i contenuti veri e quindi finanziando l'informazione di qualità, tutelando il pluralismo, sostenendo il giornalismo investigativo e garantendo ai professionisti come voi la possibilità di poter lavorare senza ricatti, senza minacce, senza ritorsioni e in maniera libera e sostenuta. E c'è una responsabilità ulteriore che riguarda la sicurezza dei giornalisti e la lotta all'impunità perché non basta condannare gli attacchi alla stampa. Lo facciamo sempre. Occorre garantire che siano indagati e che siano perseguiti anche quelli che commissionano le intimidazioni, che non devono potersi nascondere dietro intermediari o interessi economici.
Penso, guardate, al caso, oggi noi siamo qui nel nome di Daphne Caruana Galizia e non possiamo non dimenticare, non possiamo non ricordare che gli assassini sono stati condannati, ma sui mandanti di quel, di quell'attentato terribile non è stata ancora fatta chiarezza.
E noi questo non possiamo dimenticarlo. La memoria di Daphne ci impone di non accettare che il coraggio di chi indaga venga pagato con la vita e che dopo un omicidio il silenzio diventi poi la seconda vittoria di quegli assassini. Non è accettabile. Difendere la democrazia significa proteggere lo spazio in cui le opinioni si formano, si confrontano, si trasformano in decisioni collettive, ma significa garantire ai cittadini la possibilità di scegliere liberamente sulla base di informazioni attendibili, significa impedire che il dibattito pubblico venga sequestrato da chi dispone di più denaro, da chi dispone di più soldi, più potere o maggiore capacità di manipolazione. Se quello spazio viene compromesso, guardate che tutto il resto poi segue.
La fiducia nelle istituzioni si indebolisce, il confronto democratico si va a deteriorare, i cittadini diventano sempre più esposti a chi vuole metterli gli uni contro gli altri. Guardate i disordini di questi giorni.
E sempre più fonti accreditate stanno riconoscendo una matrice comune dietro quei disordini. E allora capite che la sfida che noi abbiamo di fronte non è soltanto tecnologica, è profondamente politica, perché riguarda il tipo di Europa che noi vogliamo essere e il valore che noi attribuiamo alla libertà. Per questo ricordare Daphne significa assumere ancora una volta insieme un impegno solenne, un impegno concreto. Fare in modo che nessun giornalista sia lasciato solo davanti ai poteri che vuole indagare significa ribadire che nessuna minaccia possa essere considerata il prezzo di quel lavoro e che nessuna democrazia possa abituarsi al silenzio di chi ha il coraggio di raccontare la verità. Questa è la nostra responsabilità.
Questa è la nostra responsabilità, io credo questa è la responsabilità del Parlamento europeo ed è questa la promessa che noi rinnoviamo ogni anno in questa occasione, non soltanto nel nome di Daphne, ma nel nome di tutti i cittadini europei che hanno diritto di vivere uno spazio libero e hanno diritto di vedere che i propri, che coloro i quali garantiscono loro libertà e conoscenza possano poter vivere in pace e liberamente. Fatemi dire che è un onore e un piacere avere con noi quest'anno Vera, che è la figlia, come sapete, di Anna Politkovskaja, un'altra donna che ha pagato per combattere il regime criminale, per far conoscere al mondo che cos'era il regime criminale di Vladimir Putin, ha pagato con la sua stessa vita. Un'altra donna che per svolgere il suo lavoro è stata trucidata nel giorno del compleanno di Vladimir Putin. Come fosse quello il regalo di compleanno che quegli assassini donavano, ecco, a quel criminale che siede ancora oggi al Cremlino. E allora nel nome di Daphne, nel nome di Anna Politkovskaja, noi siamo qui a ribadire da che parte è il Parlamento europeo e da che parte sono le istituzioni europee: dalla parte della democrazia, della libertà e della libertà di stampa.
Grazie a tutti e a tutti voi.
Vera
Hello everybody, I will continue in Russian. Thank you. Добрый день, госпожа вице-президент, уважаемые депутаты и участники семинара. Спасибо за возможность выступить здесь в Европарламенте. В этом году исполнилось 20 лет со дня убийства журналистки Анны Политковской.
Для меня это 20 лет без мамы. Для остальных — 20 лет, за которые её имя стало синонимом смелости, свободы прессы и готовности, несмотря ни на что, говорить правду, какой бы неудобной она ни была. Сейчас её работа, книги и расследования стали многими восприниматься иначе, чем тогда, в 2006 году, когда её убили. То, о чём она писала, выдержало и проверку временем, и последующими реальными событиями. Она многое предсказала, хотя тогда ей почти никто не верил.
«Кто, если не я?» — так она всегда отвечала на попытки удержать её от опасной деятельности. Вопросы, которые она ставила перед властью и обществом, остаются актуальными и 20 лет спустя. Но сегодня в этом зале я бы хотела поднять один, возможно, самый главный вопрос: должен ли журналист исполнять свой профессиональный долг даже тогда, когда это становится смертельно опасно для него самого? У меня нет простого ответа на этот вопрос. Я помню, как отвечала на него мама, но мне трудно согласиться с тем, что готовность рисковать своей жизнью должна становиться обязательным условием профессии журналиста.
Может быть, стоит тогда уже официально отнести журналистику к опасным профессиям наряду с пожарными и полицейскими? Ведь журналисту для выполнения работы выдают только блокнот и диктофон, но не средства защиты. Если журналист вынужден ежедневно выбирать между честностью и собственной безопасностью, значит, что-то не так с обществом, в котором он живёт и для которого он работает. Сегодня мы собрались в память о другой убитой журналистке — Дафне Каруане Галиции.
Премия, которая носит ее имя, отмечает тех, кто продолжает ее дело и раскрывает неудобную правду. Несмотря на то, что Дафна работала в другой стране и расследовала другие истории, столкнулась она в итоге с тем же самым, с чем и Анна Политковская. Правда, которую она раскрывала, угрожала интересам влиятельных людей. Она расследовала коррупцию, отмывание денег, связи политиков с бизнесом. За это она получала угрозы, против нее подавали судебные иски, но она продолжала работать и публиковаться.
И от нее тоже смогли добиться молчания, только убив. Когда говорят, что Анна Политковская или Дафна Каруана Галиция знали, на что шли, у меня возникает встречный вопрос: а что сделали те, кто знал, какой опасности они подвергаются? Давайте будем честны: как 20 лет назад, так и сейчас, журналиста проще чтить после смерти, чем защищать при жизни. Все обычно восхищаются смелостью журналистов, пострадавших или убитых за правду.
Но сегодня смелость нужна уже не только журналистам, чтобы честно исполнять профессиональный долг. Сейчас она как никогда необходима тем, кому адресованы те самые критические, жесткие и неудобные журналистские материалы, потому что любой журналист на самом деле работает только ради одного — чтобы донести информацию до своей аудитории. Готовы ли сегодня политики, общество, каждый из нас слышать то, что противоречит нашим убеждениям и ставит под сомнение правильность принятых решений? Реальность отвечает на этот вопрос отрицательно. И вот немного неудобной правды.
В Европе журналисты тоже сталкиваются с давлением и цензурой, когда говорят то, чего от них не хотят слышать. Это происходит не только где-то там, в далекой России, скатившейся в вопросах свободы прессы на дно, но и здесь. Меня часто спрашивают: а что могут сделать европейские политики для того, чтобы помочь остановить войну в Украине? Как не допустить, чтобы европейские страны пошли путем России? Потому что происходящее здесь и то, как на это реагирует общество, тоже вызывает определенную тревогу за будущее.
В последние годы я много общалась с европейскими журналистами.
И должна признаться, что на мой вопрос, есть ли в вашем СМИ цензура, ни один из них ни разу мне не ответил, что в его редакции цензуры нет. Кто-то отвечал честно, кто-то отшучивался, но ни одного «нет» я не услышала. Критиковать чужую власть, чужую пропаганду и ошибки просто. Настоящая проверка свободы прессы начинается там, где неудобная правда касается тебя и твоей страны. Когда эта неудобная правда внезапно наступает на твои интересы или бьет по политическим союзникам.
Или, например, по тем, кто финансирует редакцию, в которой работает въедливый и бескомпромиссный журналист. Сохраняется ли тогда у него возможность говорить свободно и готова ли редакция защищать его право задавать неудобные вопросы, если ответы могут навредить интересам всей редакции? Говоря о свободе прессы, необходимо обсуждать и ограничения внутри европейских редакций. Кто и в чьих интересах их устанавливает? И о чем их читатели, зрители или слушатели никогда не узнают из-за этих подковерных игр?
Для аудитории это всегда остается за кадром. Читатель получает картину происходящего, но не знает, чего в ней не хватает и почему. Поэтому свобода прессы — это не только право журналиста говорить.
Это и право общества знать, даже то, на что хотелось бы закрыть глаза. Как в таком случае поддерживать независимую журналистику? Для политиков — это честно отвечать на вопросы, в том числе неприятные, и обеспечивать доступ к информации, которую общество имеет право знать. Для владельцев СМИ — это означает не требовать от подчиненных лояльности в обмен на возможность работать. А редакции не должны оставлять журналистов один на один с угрозами и давлением из-за их публикаций.
Сегодня премия имени Дафны Каруаны Галиции отмечает журналистов, которые раскрывают неудобную правду. Я хочу поздравить победителей и финалистов и поблагодарить вас за эту тяжелую работу. Желаю вам, чтобы поддержка, которую вы получаете сегодня, сохранилась и в будущем, особенно тогда, когда ваш новый журналистский материал окажется неудобным для тех, кто сегодня вам аплодирует. Спасибо.
Pina Picierno
I want to thank Matthew and Corinne for being with us, and I want to ask to this room to have a big applause for them. And it's a big honor to have you with us also in this year, and above all, thank for your commitment in the name of Daphne. Thank you so much.
Raffaella
Yeah. And maybe, Pina, we can extend this to the parents of Ján Kuciak, who are already connected online: Jozef and Jana. Okay, thank you, thank you, Vera. Thank you, Pina, for your passionate words and your testimony. And I would like to invite now Matthew Caruana Galizia, Corinne Vella, and Pierre Degar on the podium, together with Jozef Kuciak, Jana Kuciaková, and Peter Kubina, the lawyer of Ján Kuciak, who are with us online.
Speaker 9
Thank you very much. You can stay as you wish. You need, you can stay so that you can take part in the event. Thanks, Corinna. Thank you.
Sorry, I couldn't hear you over the music. Thank you for your speech. See you later. Okay. Where would you like us to sit?
Raffaella
Thanks to all. So in the introduction we have already mentioned it, we mentioned the data from Reporters Without Borders that is a chilling data and we asked them, so Reporters Without Borders, to come and give us a bit the mapping of the situation of press freedom in Europe and beyond and why journalists are not yet safe. So we are very glad before giving the floor to the families of our two journalists killed to have Pierre Dagard, who is head of advocacy at Reporters Without Borders. By the way, Reporters Without Borders has also been a Sakharov winner in 2005 to remind also the role that press freedom plays in human rights.
And so please give us, Pierre, an overview of the state of the press and also the escalating dangers that affect journalists every day.
Pierre Dagard
Thank you very much. If you allow me, I'm gonna speak in French. Merci beaucoup pour cette introduction et j'en profite aussi pour vous remercier de l'invitation qui nous est faite et qui m'est faite de venir vous parler des menaces que nous observons sur la liberté de la presse. RSF est une organisation internationale. Je dirige son pôle plaidoyer au siège international de RSF qui est à Paris, mais nous sommes une organisation présente dans à peu près 150 pays du monde.
Et donc depuis 2002, nous établissons chaque année un classement mondial de la liberté de la presse, ce qui nous permet de voir quelles sont les tendances. Elles ne sont pas réjouissantes, malheureusement. Le classement n'est pas un palmarès, c'est plutôt une invitation au changement. Et donc je suis heureux que le Parlement européen organise cet événement aujourd'hui parce que c'est vraiment l'essentiel du message que je veux faire passer aujourd'hui.
Alors ça a été mentionné déjà auparavant sur la tendance au déclin de la liberté de la presse dans le monde. Je voudrais simplement donner un seul chiffre qui est assez illustratif. Lors du dernier classement que nous avons publié au mois de mai, nous avons relevé qu'aujourd'hui dans le monde seulement 1 % de la population mondiale vit dans un pays où la liberté de la presse est garantie. Quand nous avons commencé à mesurer la liberté de la presse dans le monde en 2002, ce pourcentage était de 20 %. Donc c'est un déclin qui est global, qui affecte absolument toutes les régions du monde et l'Europe n'est pas évidemment épargnée par cette tendance.
Alors il faut dire que évidemment relativement à d'autres régions du monde, l'Europe reste l'endroit aujourd'hui le plus sûr pour exercer le métier de journaliste.
Il faut dire aussi que nous avons grâce au règlement européen sur la liberté des médias une législation unique au monde sur la liberté de la presse, sur la protection des droits des journalistes mais également sur la protection du pluralisme des médias, ce qui montre que l'Europe a encore, joue encore une forme de leadership au niveau mondial. Pour autant, rien n'est acquis. Même l'EMFA, même ce règlement européen sur la liberté des médias est un acquis précieux mais un acquis fragile car on voit ici ou là de plusieurs États membres qui peinent à vraiment l'appliquer. Donc RSF se place vraiment comme une organisation de combat. Les temps sont durs pour les journalistes, pour la liberté de la presse à travers le monde, y compris en Europe, et il reste des conquêtes à faire.
Alors comme c'est un premier propos liminaire, je vais pas être beaucoup plus long. Je voudrais simplement vous donner trois points qui me paraissent aujourd'hui très importants dans le contexte européen. Le premier, et on va en parler j'imagine beaucoup aujourd'hui, c'est la question de l'impunité. L'impunité des crimes commis contre les journalistes. On meurt encore pour la liberté de la presse en Europe.
Et ça c'est quelque chose qui devrait nous alarmer. On ne peut pas laisser l'impunité s'installer parce que c'est une manière de préparer les futurs crimes contre des journalistes. C'est en ce sens un combat qu'il faut mener tous les jours contre l'impunité.
Et pour cela, il faut des capacités, mais surtout une volonté de rendre justice. Et ça, je dirais que c'est le minimum de garantir la sécurité des journalistes. Le deuxième point, c'est aussi de réaffirmer, et c'est encore malheureusement nécessaire en Europe aussi, de réaffirmer que le journalisme n'est pas un crime. Que les meurtres qui ont été commis contre Daphné, contre Ján Kuciak, j'aimerais aussi mentionner l'assassinat de ce journaliste grec, Giórgos Karaïváz, il y a cinq ans. Ces meurtres-là sont l'acmé d'un processus qui est un processus de criminalisation du journalisme, notamment par le biais de procédures bâillons infinies qui épuisent les journalistes psychologiquement, financièrement, et pas seulement les journalistes, mais aussi des rédactions toutes entières qui parfois sont même obligées de fermer à cause de ces procédures bâillons.
C'est une criminalisation qui passe aussi par le détournement du droit de la presse qui est bien sûr plus protecteur que d'autres droits comme le droit à la vie privée, le droit à la protection intellectuelle, le droit des affaires, mais qui sont aujourd'hui les voies légales par lesquelles des acteurs puissants, politiques, économiques contournent le droit de la presse pour s'en prendre à des journalistes pour là aussi les entraîner dans des procédures judiciaires harassantes. Et puis il y a encore aujourd'hui en Europe, et c'était le cas il n'y a pas si longtemps avec le scandale dont vous avez sûrement entendu parler de Pegasus, de Predator, des journalistes visés par des mesures de surveillance par des États démocratiques et que tout ceci là aussi se passe en toute impunité puisque l'opacité règne en la matière. Et le dernier point sur lequel j'aimerais insister et d'ailleurs je voudrais saluer l'intervention de la vice-présidente Madame Picierno à ce sujet car ce dont je vous parle à l'instant ce sont les menaces les plus visibles sur la liberté de la presse. Mais il y a toutes les menaces qu'on voit moins, toutes les crises auxquelles le journalisme est aujourd'hui confronté. Et Madame Picierno en a cité de nombreuses, il y a une crise géopolitique, des leaders populistes qui sont élus et qui sont hostiles aux médias, qui sont hostiles aux médias et qui font même parfois campagne sans les médias, qui préfèrent aller voir des podcasteurs amis qui ne les contredisent pas dans leurs propos quand bien même ils disent des stupidités.
Il y a une crise économique bien sûr, une crise technologique.
Les contenus journalistiques sont aujourd'hui largement invisibles sur les plateformes de réseaux sociaux, dans les agents d'IA, les chatbots conversationnels. Et donc toutes ces crises elles se conjuguent et elles nous font craindre à RSF, et c'est une crainte très sérieuse, que le journalisme disparaisse. Alors il ne disparaîtra peut-être pas totalement mais en tout cas disparaisse en tant que fonction sociale comme un élément central au fondement d'un débat public que j'espère dans cette salle nous souhaitons tous, c'est-à-dire un débat public fondé sur les faits d'abord et les opinions ensuite. Je vous remercie.
Raffaella
Merci Pierre, thank you for setting the scene. And I'm honored now to pass the floor. You mentioned already the impunity, the intimidations, and I think that the families of journalists that have been victim of horrible crimes like Daphne and Jan are paying a double price, not only having lost their dear ones but also becoming victims of a very painful judiciary process and very heavy weight on their shoulders.
This is the case for Daphne and unfortunately also the case for Jan. So we would like to turn to you, Matthew and Corinna, first to hear about your testimony. We heard about the shameful recent verdict that Mrs. Picierno mentioned before. You can maybe give us some elements to understand what happened and also explain what are the next steps. Thank you.
Thank you, Raffaella. Can everyone hear me? Yeah, cool. So where to begin? I think I should begin by thanking you for inviting us here and also acknowledging that we're not the only families who are representing journalists who have been killed.
Speaker 10
We have of course Anna Politkovskaya, someone we remember every year. There's also Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová who accompanied, who was unfortunately with him and was killed too. Giorgos Karaivaz, you mentioned, there have been other journalists killed in Europe since then. Daphne's death had shocked people because it was the first in the EU for about 25 years. And at the time, Matthew and his brothers had warned that if nothing is done, there will be other murders.
And only four months later, Jan was killed with Martina.
And then there were others, a journalist in Bulgaria, a journalist in the Netherlands, a journalist in Greece. And there is still outstanding impunity for journalists in wider Europe, especially in Russia, as we know very well. We had hope that in Daphne's case, there would be a step up from the tradition, let's call it, of impunity for journalists' murders. There are convictions when journalists are killed, but they tend to be very low-level operatives. In Daphne's case, five people have already been convicted and we are repeatedly reminded of this whenever we talk about impunity.
But the people who have been convicted are the people who planted the bomb and the people who supplied it. The people who ordered the killing, they have not been convicted. Yorgen Fenech was charged for complicity in Daphne's murder. There is a very strong motive for him to have had her killed. There was overwhelming evidence to convict him.
But when the jury trial came to pass this summer, years after he was first arrested, he was acquitted with a unanimous vote on both counts of complicity.
And this is despite his confession to the police in his statement of actions that amount to complicity in murder. This is a statement he gave to the police after talking to his lawyer for some 20 hours. And he gave that statement in the presence of his lawyer. And that statement to the police was recorded and it was played in court. Everybody in court could see and hear what he said.
And then unusually he took the witness stand in his own defense. That's not a common occurrence because it opens you to cross-examination. His strategy of defense was mitigation. Poor little me, I was under a lot of pressure, I was taking drugs and so on, blaming, you know, everybody but himself. But among much of what he said was a critical piece of information.
Speaker 10
He said, and confirming what he had said in the statement, that he was aware there was a plot to kill Daphne. He could have gone to the police but he chose not to, even though the assistant police commissioner at the time was a very close friend of his, so close they had actually got into several WhatsApp chats together, cracking jokes, you know, behaving completely indecorously for somebody in authority. But he did not use that WhatsApp chat to tell that assistant police commissioner there is a plot to kill a journalist.
Instead, he took money, some 50,000, and he paid it to the middleman in the murder. And he claims that he did it to stop the murder, but that money went to the hitman and the murder was carried out anyway. That too is an admission of complicity. It is complicity by omission for failing to report a crime, preventing, failing to prevent it. But he was acquitted.
And this is where we are today. After we got used to the idea, so to speak, of that shock verdict, we've had to rally and continue what we have been doing for years. And the message that has come back to us again and again from several people who are shocked by the verdict is that it feels like we have been sent back to 2017. That is how earth-shattering that verdict is. That failure to convict is not a failure to us.
Speaker 10
It's not a failure to Daphne. It's not even just a failure to Malta. It's a failure for Europe. Even at a basic economic level, Europol has invested time, effort, energy and resources into supporting the investigation into Daphne's murder. Very unusually for the murder of a journalist, the investigation managed to identify someone beyond the low-level operatives, managed to secure his arrest, charge him, bring him to court, bring him to trial, and then was let down by a justice system that cannot live up to its responsibilities.
That is a failure for Europe. It is a failure of Europe as well, because Daphne's murder, like Anna's, like George's, like Jan's, should have been prevented. No journalist should, as Anna said, as Vera said about her mother Anna, a willingness to risk your life should not be a prerequisite for your work as a journalist. And the risk to your life should not be part of the job. Even firemen, soldiers, there are rules for those professions.
Safety procedures are in place to prevent people dying on the job, and those are known to be high risk. Where are the protections for journalists? Not just for the people who have been killed, but for the people working today. It's something, it's a question I got right after the verdict. You know, what I think about the verdict, what I think about the investigation, and my only thought was, up to 10 minutes ago, you lived in a country where a journalist had been killed, but there was a hope of justice for that murder.
Now you live and work in a country where you can kill a journalist and get away with murder. What does that mean, not just for journalists in Malta, for journalists in Europe generally? If this can happen in the European Union, what hope is there for greater Europe?
What hope is there for the other parts of the world where the press freedom ranking has crashed from 20% to 1%? Was it Global Freedom? 20% of the world's population lived in a country with guaranteed press freedom and now only 1% do. So if this can happen in the European Union, what happens to the other 99% and the journalists working there? This is not a family problem, it is not even a Maltese problem, it is a global problem.
Speaker 10
But Europe has mechanisms that it can use to protect and prevent murder and to protect journalists as they work. It's in the interest of democracy. We can't bring back Anna, we cannot bring back Ján and Martina, we cannot bring back Giorgos, we cannot bring back any of the journalists who have been killed, but we can put systems in place to make sure it doesn't happen again. And Malta is a good place to start, I think, as with Slovakia and, you know, other and Greece and other countries where journalists have been killed. I would like to say one more thing about the the court case against Fenech.
The reaction we have had is, so who do you think actually killed Daphne? My answer is always the same. I know it was Yorgen Fenech because I have seen the evidence and he knows it too because he did it. Whoever might have wanted Daphne dead and benefited from her murder, but failed to act on it, cannot be convicted of her murder, unfortunately.
But the person who acted with criminal intent can be. As with Ján Kuciak's case, Marián Kočner has been acquitted twice. He's being tried again. Does anyone doubt he is responsible just because he has been acquitted? That is a failure of the justice system.
It is not a failure of the investigation and it's certainly not a failure of the families and the journalists who have been killed. I think I should stop there, otherwise...
Thank you. You have the merit of being crystal clear. Matthew.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Thank you. I don't have that much to add to that except that, I mean for us we're in a state right now where our only hope is that there is a retrial, that the judiciary in Malta acknowledges the serious problems with the legal process around the trial and orders that there is a retrial.
I don't know what would happen after that. I mean, can we guarantee that the next trial, if there is one, would be held in better circumstances and with better procedures and more respect for the law and rights of victims and so on? No, I don't have any guarantee of that. But right now, it's the only hope that we have for things to be done legally. These processes are the only things that separate us from acts of violence, which would otherwise be our only recourse.
And it's important that when these processes fail, when the outcomes are not the outcomes that society needs, that politicians take action and show leadership, more leadership and less arrogance.
Because we cannot, we cannot continue living under systems that don't deliver the outcomes that are required to live in a free society. And for me, a society where my mother's murderer is just simply running around is not one that I can bear to live in. And I think the same is true for all other victims of such crimes, or for all other individuals, really. So I wanted to use this intervention to really appeal to political leaders. Please show leadership.
Your job is one of public administration, not of furthering your own career. So you always have to think in those terms: what can I be doing in this very moment to better serve the public and the public interest? So that is my appeal. Thank you.
Raffaella
Thank you. Thank you a lot for reminding us of this, Matthew. And I would like to now also welcome, of course, online, Jozef and Jana, the parents of Ján Kuciak. Ján was murdered together with his fiancée Martina Kušnírová, and the two families are going through a painful process and judiciary steps.
And we also have with us Ján's lawyer, who is Peter, Peter Kubina. So very welcome and I would like to give the floor to Jozef and Jana. It's the first time we have you with us, so it's really a great honor. You are enduring a long process, it's almost nine years. How is it for you, how are you feeling and what are your hopes for the process to conclude or to advance in the justice system?
Thank you. I think it's Jozef and Jana who will speak first in Slovak, so we can maybe... Can you hear us?
Speaker 12
Dobrý deň, zdravím všetkých. Krád rozsudok. Dúfam, že teraz už sa prihliadne na všetky faktory, podľa mňa je na vine aj to, kto je za tým. Zistili to aj vyšetrovatelia na pomery Slovenska pomerne rýchlo, takisto v priebehu toho prvého dňa z nášho súdneho pojednávania sa tam odstraňovali rozpory vo výpovediach.
Speaker 15
Išlo napríklad o fotografie zo sledovania aj iných novinárov. A niekedy pred ôsmimi rokmi vypovedal hlavný svedok, že tú fotografiu si nepamätá. Nakoniec priznal, že ju niekde videl, to bolo pred pár mesiacmi. Ale keď ju desaťkrát mu bola predkladaná v rôznych úlohách, tak mu utkvela v pamäti a to je veľmi nenápadná perlička, že čo považujú za rozpor. Dosť ma to vtedy rozhodilo.
Jozef Kuciak
Skrátka čakám, že sa to už konečne ukončí a že tí, čo sa tomu môžu, budú potrestaní. Lebo ináč Janko si robil iba svoju prácu. Lebo sa hovorí, že investigatívni novinári chránia demokraciu a odstraňujú hlavne korupciu medzi štátnymi úradníkmi. A u nás na Slovensku je verejne známe, že vznikla nejaká skupina, má aj svoj názov, sú to takzvaní naši ľudia. A tí majú ochranu aj súdov aj polície, je to tam už skrátka tak zaužívané.
Peter Kubina
I'll focus on stuff that so that I won't be repeating myself. As it has been said, the case is currently being retried for the second time, which means that there was the first trial and then there was the appeals process, successful for the prosecution and for the victims, which then led to a retrial because there were changes to the original tribunal, which in Slovakia under Slovak law gives the defendant the right to request a full retrial, which was used. And on the second attempt, we went through the entire trial again. In the first part, in the first trial, the triggerman and the hitman were sentenced and one low-level intermediary. In the second or on the second attempt, the first retrial, the higher-level intermediary, Mrs. Zsuzsová, was sentenced as well, who was acquitted on the first occasion.
But Mr. Kočner, as the person who has commissioned or who is charged with commissioning, ordering the murder, has been acquitted again.
And as the as the first instance court committed the same series of mistakes which have been which have been by the first appellate court, we appealed and the prosecution appealed again, we joined. And on on the second appeal, the the second judgment was quashed again, even against Mrs. Zsuzsova, but not because because her her guilt would not be sufficiently proven, but the the appellate court shared the view of the prosecutor and of of us as as the victims' family's party lawyers that actually actually sentencing or convicting Mrs. Zsuzsova without doesn't make sense without without Mr. Kocner simply because she has no or there was no interest of her own identified in the whole in the whole murder, in the in the circumstances which led to it. So now the case was the case was remanded to the first instance court again, and now the appellate court ordered that it be retried by a new new by a completely new tribunal or newly composed tribunal.
The defendant of course again exercises his right to request a full retrial and that's the stage we're now where we're now. The positive thing is that of course there are a lot of negative things. First of all that it's taking so long and it's really it must be and it is really frustrating for the for the victims' families. We as the lawyers are are used to these kind of processes and and retrials and and for things taking taking a long time but it's it's really hard to to explain and to understand for for the victims' families which is quite quite natural. But what is positive about about the current stage is that the court has set about 50 hearing dates starting from February this year.
So we are now we are now in a quite an advanced stage of of the of the second retrial and there has not been a single day single trial date wasted which is which means that the tribunal really shows that they they are quite well or very well actually into or read into the file and they they know the case and the important details very well which is which is very positive. And it's it's a it's a big difference in my eyes compared to the previous two occasions.
And now the retrial is at a very advanced stage and I would expect there are maybe nine or ten further hearing dates until the end of the year. And I think there will be a few more, but my expectation is that maybe or likely before summer 2027 there should be a ruling of the first instance. Another positive thing is that now on this second retrial occasion or third trial, depends on how you look at it, the tribunal seems to be going into much more depth or significantly more depth than the previous two. There is evidence being discussed at court which for example has not been discussed before. So that's positive as well.
And all the mistakes or the faults which the previous two tribunals have committed or have made in their judgment, they were quite easy errors.
And so I am hopeful that the new, this current tribunal will not commit the same errors. And I am hopeful that we will see a fair and logical, that's most important, logical and comprehensible judgment, which even if it would not be, even in the case there would be an acquittal, which is always possible, that at least it would be, it could be received and understood by the parties. The previous two judgments were very incomprehensible in this sense and they didn't make much sense when it came to the level beyond the triggerman and the first intermediary.
Raffaella
Thanks. Thanks a lot, Peter. Thanks to Jan's family. And it is, I think, a good moment to open. I'm sure there will be questions from the room.
It's really a very special occasion to have these three families here with us. So I'm sure there will be some questions or some comments from the room. And we have the time. I know the first is always difficult after this, but yeah, go ahead.
Be courageous and break the ice.
Lucie Sýkorová
Hi, I'm a Czech journalist, my name is Lucie Sýkorová. I would like to ask Matthew, if I may, or Corinne. Matthew mentioned in 2021 that there were still people in Malta that even, who even celebrated or defend the murder. Would you say that this changed after now, after the last trial, or the opinions in the society, the attitude of such, the atmosphere in the society, is it now different at least? Thank you.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
One thing that left me really hopeful following the verdict is that in a survey which was done about a month afterwards, so after most of the initial shock had subsided, found that almost 90% of Malta's entire population expected Yorgen Fenech, the accused, to be convicted. So that jars completely with a unanimous verdict by a jury that is supposed to be representative of that same population. And in Malta, trials are held in open court. Everyone sees the evidence, there is minute-by-minute reporting by journalists of what is happening in the courtroom.
So the public sees the same evidence that the jury sees. And this has meant that I think we need to kind of readjust as well. The one of the hardest things to accomplish, which is cultural change, has probably not completely been accomplished yet, but we've gone a long way towards it. And now we're probably in a situation where almost everyone recognizes, including the government itself, that we have a shared interest in making this person complicit in the murder pay the price for that murder. And this is probably the first time that that shared interest has been recognized.
About time, I mean, after almost 10 years. But this leaves me with some hope. However, action is needed. I mean, I was really happy with with Ms. Picierno's speech because it shows that yes, we are on the same page about this. But she cannot take action in Malta.
So they need to follow those words with the action that is required to deliver the outcomes that are needed. Otherwise, that will mean that government has abandoned political responsibility. And then what happens after that, I don't know. Thank you for your question.
Only the Maltese government can do that.
Raffaella
Thanks a lot, Matthew. I see other hands. Yes, Monsieur with lunettes. Introduce yourself.
Pablo Ikel
Oui, bonjour, je vais parler en français. Bonjour, je suis Pablo Ikel, le vice-président de la Fédération européenne des journalistes. Je vous remercie toutes et tous pour l'organisation de ce séminaire. Nous avons organisé d'ailleurs un hommage à Daphne Caruana Galizia la semaine dernière à Paris, les organisations syndicales des journalistes professionnels en France avec la FIJ, la Fédération internationale, et la FEJ, la Fédération européenne, en coopération avec RSF et d'autres.
Simplement signaler, comme l'a dit Pierre Dagar, qu'il y a beaucoup de pays dans lesquels l'EMFA n'est pas encore appliquée correctement. Nous venons de faire un rapport sur la situation de la liberté de la presse en France avec le collectif Media Freedom Rapid Response, dans lequel RSF a également coopéré. On est très en retard en France. Et je voulais interpeller Jesús Carmona et Pina Picierno, merci pour leurs interventions très fortes au début, notamment sur ce qu'ils ont dit sur les journalistes précaires, l'importance que les journalistes ne soient pas précaires. Hier, il y a eu une manifestation contre le 28e régime, en anglais on dit EU Inc.
Ce régime, nous considérons, les organisations syndicales, qu'il peut mettre à mal le cadre de travail des journalistes et notamment des journalistes les plus précaires. Donc il faut prendre en compte cela et également mettre les moyens nécessaires dans le projet Agora EU. Si l'EMFA veut être ambitieux, il faut qu'il y ait des moyens. Merci.
Raffaella
Not sure it's a question, but Jesús, I don't know if you... no. Okay, thanks for raising the point. Yes, here in the first row, please introduce yourself, even if...
Andy Vermout
I'm Andy Vermout from Indegazette.be and I wanted to ask a question to Matthew Caruana regarding the appreciation competence in Belgium. I don't know how it is in Malta, but in Belgium there is an appreciation competence of the Minister of Justice when things go horribly wrong in justice courts. So is this possibility there in the case of Daphne Caruana? And still another question: you are yourself still a journalist while your mother is murdered. Are you not afraid yourself to do the job?
Matthew Caruana Galizia
I'm not sure what you meant by the first part of the question because I don't think we have anything similar in Malta. Our Justice Minister has sort of shirked responsibility by saying, "This is our system, if you don't like it, then that's your problem." As in, you know, sort of our system is broken, but that's our system, screw you. Those were the words of our Justice Minister in summary. So I think it's probably the opposite to what you're describing.
There is no, you know, there is no, there is no apology. I mean, far from it. There is the justice minister saying, you know, whatever, that's it, this is our system, deal with it. But again, like, that statement jars with the expectations of the majority of the population. 90% of Maltese people expected a conviction.
On the second part of your question, I no longer, I mean, I never worked as a reporter. My brother is a journalist. I spent all of my time on the legal process. I spent most of my time working with lawyers, and it's been like that for the past nine years. So you can imagine.
In fact, I often think, you know, what would have happened if my mother had no adult children? And the reality is that we would have never gotten this far, because our system really requires this much effort, where family members have to sacrifice their entire lives just to get a shot at obtaining justice, let alone actually getting it.
And of course, this is inadequate. I mean, the European Union prides itself on being better than everyone else. But when our systems are actually put to the test, then they are found to have failed. So we have to make a choice at this moment. Do we want to live with these broken systems and do what Malta's Minister of Justice does, which says, whatever, you know, this is it, deal with it, and put Jan's family through the same trauma over and over and over again, nine years, ten years later, or do we want to finally, once and for all, take the action that is needed to fix these systems?
Raffaella
Thank you, Matthew. I would like to address this point of the support of the society to the parents of Jan because in Slovakia too, there was quite a mobilization, mass protest, people taking the streets after Jan's murder. Is this still the case? Do you still feel the support of the civil society in Slovakia and how this is useful or helpful for you?
Jozef Kuciak
Bohužiaľ, tá podpora sa dvíha u nás len vtedy, keď je nejaká národná vlastnosť, alebo čo, že u nás naši ľudia rýchlo vzplanú, ale takisto rýchlo ich to prejde.
Videli sme to aj pri tej podpore, keď Rusko napadlo Ukrajinu a každý chcel podporovať Ukrajinu a teraz sa to kamsi stráca. No prišli tie dezinformácie, všetko je zle a tak to ide aj tá podpora dole vodou. Ďakujem.
Peter Kubina
To add on top of what Mr. Kuciak has said, it's on one hand, it's quite natural human behavior that, okay, something, there is some big emotion and big uprising in the society and then the level of interest just slightly deteriorates.
So this is something which is, which in my view is natural. But what is more alarming and what is more dangerous actually is that the individuals or the politicians who in the past have actually created the environment that made the murder of a journalist possible and that it actually, let's call it, inspired someone to actually do it, this government had to step down at that time. And now they're back in power. And this social environment which was in place back then is being reinstated for the last three years. And what is quite alarming is that the Prime Minister, who is the Prime Minister now and who was Prime Minister at the time of Ján's murder, I don't recall him ever calling Ján by name in his public speeches.
And the only victim which he sees is himself, by having to actually step down back in 2018.
And this is this is quite disappointing and alarming to me because because the the high-ranking politicians are the ones who actually set the trends for for the behavior of of the society. And if if people see that this is this is that this kind of behavior and this kind of social climate is okay again, then it's a question of time until we we have another another similar crime happening.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
I couldn't agree more with that with that statement, honestly. I mean, the the government is ultimately responsible for the social environment which is created and and which makes that murder possible.
Raffaella
I think this was also connecting to what Pierre said in the beginning, you know, maybe it would be interesting also to have your comment as a Reporter Without Borders. I mean, when we are talking of the masterminds that are not convicted, what is the effect on the society and on the media freedom in general? What what is in...
Pierre Dagard
L'effet, il dépasse je dirais le cas des journalistes qui sont directement visés, ceux qui sont tués, ceux qui sont menacés.
L'effet, il se mesure aussi, même si c'est difficile de le mesurer justement, mais il se mesure aussi en fonction de l'effet d'autocensure que cette impunité crée. Et dans le cas des journalistes et des crimes qui sont commis contre les journalistes, le taux d'impunité s'élève à environ 90 %. C'est énorme. Et RSF, on s'est donné pour mission d'essayer de faire réduire ce taux. Et c'est un peu ce que je disais tout à l'heure, nous avons de notre expérience la certitude que lorsque la volonté des autorités est là pour rendre justice, justice peut être rendue.
Je voudrais mentionner des exemples, par exemple aux Pays-Bas avec l'assassinat de Peter de Vries. Les auteurs et commanditaires ont été condamnés dans cette affaire. On peut citer également le cas de Charlie Hebdo en France. Je voudrais citer un autre cas peut-être qui a moins fait la une de l'actualité, mais c'est une affaire aussi en France concernant un journaliste azéri d'Azerbaïdjan, Monsieur Mirzali, qui a été attaqué par un commando de la mort sur le sol français. Et les auteurs de cette attaque ont été condamnés à 30 ans de réclusion criminelle par le tribunal de Rennes en France.
Donc on voit bien que lorsque la volonté, à commencer par la volonté de la justice, du pouvoir judiciaire est là, la justice peut être rendue. Et dans les cas maltais, grecs, slovaques qu'on a évoqués aujourd'hui, c'est ça qui est en cause. Et les doutes que nous avons, ils portent sur la volonté réelle d'aboutir ces affaires et de rendre justice. Et là-dessus, je crois que d'ailleurs les institutions européennes, à commencer par le Parlement européen qui nous accueille aujourd'hui, ont un rôle à jouer pour maintenir cette exigence. Cette exigence de rendre justice.
90 %, c'est le taux d'impunité aujourd'hui pour les crimes commis contre les journalistes. Et au-delà de l'Europe, si vous me permettez, j'aimerais aussi dire que malheureusement cette impunité, elle est, on la constate et on l'observe notamment dans les conflits en cours, que ce soit au Proche-Orient, que ce soit en Ukraine.
Là-dessus je voudrais tout de même mentionner un développement qui est assez récent et intéressant c'est que la Cour pénale internationale à la suite d'une saisine de RSF a reconnu pour la première fois que les journalistes syriens qui ont été assassinés pendant le mandat de Bachar el-Assad ont été victimes de crimes contre l'humanité, de persécution en raison de leur activité journalistique. Et c'est ce dernier point qui est très important pour nous. Nous espérons qu'il pourra faire jurisprudence pour les journalistes palestiniens, pour les journalistes ukrainiens, pour tous les journalistes qui sont victimes de ces crimes en raison de leur profession parce que c'est au-delà des personnes et des individus c'est leur fonction en société qui est qui est attaquée.
Raffaella
Merci. Thank you. I saw some more raised hands, the lady there and then behind.
Okay. Can you hear me? Yes. Good afternoon. Hello.
My name is Rodica Ciubotina and I come from across the canal from the Council of Europe, from the Freedom of Expression and CDMSI Division that is also the one dealing with the Journalists Matter campaign of which I'm a manager. This is a campaign meant to last for five years.
Speaker 24
I've already had the pleasure to have Matthew in our events. It's a real honor to meet here also Vera Politkovskaya on a personal note, more than 17 years ago when I was at the university I visited the newsroom of Anna in Moscow to write an article on her work. Going back to the campaign, we're trying to work with different groups of the society, first of all with the governments, but also with the law enforcement, police, judiciary and so on. And this year a particular focus is on the youth sector. The question of culture and mentality in the society was mentioned, a society that has the awareness about the role of the journalists and the importance of their safety.
While working with the youth, we came across the fact that the youth sector gets the information nowadays a little bit differently from what it used to be. They follow rather influencers, digital creators, and it's more and more difficult to raise awareness about the issues around the safety of journalists for them, and including the issue of the impunity.
We will also have a conference here in 9 and 10 November where we selected youth from all across Council of Europe member states to discuss exactly the importance of the safety of journalists nowadays. So the question is rather to all the panel: how do we reach out to the young people nowadays to raise awareness about the issues we are discussing here? And thank you very much again.
Thanks to you. Anybody here to speak about this level of complexity with the youth? Věra, you want to maybe enter? No? Okay.
Pierre Dagard
Moi je veux bien. La première chose que je voudrais dire, c'est que, et c'est valable pour la jeunesse, c'est valable pour toutes les catégories de la population en réalité ce que je vais dire. Il faut rappeler, et RSF nous apportons notre contribution à ça, nous essayons de faire la pédagogie de la liberté de la presse et de la valeur ajoutée du journalisme en démocratie. Et nous commençons toujours quand nous nous adressons et notamment à un public jeune par distinguer le journalisme des médias. Et c'est d'ailleurs quelque chose qui est assez clair dans leur esprit en réalité.
Il faut simplement les inciter à eux-mêmes faire cette distinction. Et en fait, quand on discute avec des citoyens, on se rend compte qu'ils sont déçus des médias, parfois aussi déçus du journalisme. Mais à RSF, on le prend plutôt pour un bon signe, c'est-à-dire qu'ils ont aussi des attentes vis-à-vis du journalisme. Et ce que l'on remarque, c'est surtout qu'il faut absolument maintenir cette distinction. Les médias, c'est une chose, le journalisme et la valeur ajoutée que présente le journalisme, les gens ont toujours de très fortes attentes par rapport à ça et voient bien le danger qu'il y a à vivre dans une société qui ne serait pas, où au sein de laquelle le débat public ne serait pas fondé sur les faits.
Or le journalisme, c'est l'expression des faits et c'est la connaissance des faits avant tout. Donc cette distinction-là et cette clarification-là, elle est très importante.
Autre chose aussi à clarifier peut-être et qui est parfois qui a été l'objet d'une certaine confusion ces derniers temps, c'est de ne pas confondre liberté de la presse et liberté d'expression et de surtout comprendre et rappeler que la liberté de la presse n'est pas la liberté d'expression des journalistes ou pire la liberté d'expression des propriétaires de médias. Et ce sont des choses très importantes à rappeler aussi pour dire que la liberté de la presse n'est pas le privilège d'une caste élitaire qui abuserait d'une sorte de parole d'autorité qui serait supérieure aux autres. C'est une fonction sociale qui comprend oui des droits mais aussi des devoirs. Et je pense que déjà quand on a cadré la discussion de cette manière, on se rend compte qu'en réalité les espoirs et les attentes que les gens ont dans le journalisme sont réels, sont toujours là, ne disparaissent pas. Oui, il y a de l'explication, de la pédagogie, de la transparence à faire de la part des médias et d'ailleurs la critique des médias est parfaitement légitime et la critique des journalistes est parfaitement légitime.
Mais il ne faut pas tomber dans l'un ou l'autre des extrêmes, ni considérer un peu bêtement que les médias et ce que disent les médias forcément ont raison et que les journalistes ont raison, c'est parfois le cas dans certaines sociétés, et à l'inverse ne pas tomber dans une critique trop virulente du travail des journalistes et des médias. Il faut maintenir un discours équilibré il me semble sur la question mais bien être clair sur les concepts.
Vittorio Di Trapani
In italiano. Mi chiamo Vittorio Di Trapani, sono un giornalista italiano e presidente della Federazione Nazionale Stampa Italiana, il sindacato dei giornalisti italiani. Due domande. Avete giustamente detto che è facile commemorare dopo l'uccisione del giornalista. Ma bisogna intervenire prima.
Quindi, a vostro giudizio, cosa bisogna fare, quali provvedimenti urgenti servono per garantire la sicurezza? La seconda domanda rivolta in particolare a Corinne e Matthew. Se ancora la giustizia non vi darà il risultato che vi aspettate, vi rivolgerete alla Corte Europea?
Okay, maybe we can start from Corinne and Matthew and you can try to answer both and then others want to take the floor as well.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Okay.
I mean, we were starting from a position in immediately after my mother's assassination where the state was completely captured. The people of South Africa and journalists in South Africa invented this brilliant phrase, which is called state capture, which describes something which has been happening for a long time, which is when businesses or organized criminal groups or both completely take over the state. And this is of course something that has happened in Italy over and over again. And in Malta it happened around my mother's assassination. It's what enabled it and which and what made it so difficult for us to work towards justice.
So because the institutions in our country were completely useless, the prosecutor was captured by criminal organization, the police were captured by organized crime, the Prime Minister's office as well, Parliament captured by the Prime Minister's office. It was an impossible situation almost. So what was one of the first things we did, my brothers, my mother's sister and I? We left the country and started campaigning within institutions outside of the country that had not been captured: the Council of Europe, the European Parliament.
And in those fora, we had a certain amount of success. The the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly, because of our initiative and upon our petition, began a process to appoint a rapporteur to investigate the circumstances of my mother's case, a Dutch politician called Pieter Omtzigt. That procedure was successful, he did his investigation against all odds and with complete opposition from the Maltese government. And that led to a public inquiry being instituted in Malta, a judicial procedure to investigate state responsibility for enabling the assassination. But now we are living in an age where these institutions, the Council of Europe, the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, they are under attack.
So if such an assassination were to happen again in a country where the state has been captured, then we would be in a position where we have we would have nowhere to run. Think of someone in Saudi Arabia, the family of a journalist in Saudi Arabia, the family of a journalist murdered in Palestine. They have nowhere else to go. They don't have the European Court of Human Rights, the European Parliament, the the Council of Europe and so on.
So when these institutions are attacked, we need to be prepared to stand up for them. To me, it is insane that the United States has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, the European Commission says nothing, the European Parliament does nothing. These are the organizations that we depend upon for our own lives. So we need to be able to do something to protect them. Thank you.
To answer your specific question, like what are the provisions that should be taken? So we had a public inquiry, there are recommendations and five years later we are still waiting. And we are facing resistance from our government to actually implementing these recommendations. One of the most recent things, we have rule of law recommendations that we have been pressing the government to implement. And we are not alone in that, there is GRECO, there is the European Parliament, there are a multitude of institutions pressing our government to do the same thing.
Speaker 10
There is an almost a unanimous voice that all the provisions have to be implemented. And there is resistance. There is a proposal to have an anti-mafia law as Italy has. Our government's reaction: we are not a mafia state. The whole point of anti-mafia law is that you don't become a mafia state, not because you are one.
It is a moot point that you should have that legislation. But beyond that, and everything that has been said so far, let's not take for granted the impact of disinformation. There is active disinformation undermining journalism as a whole, undermining institutions as a whole. And it is a pattern you could probably see in all the journalists' murders that we have seen over here and in others as well. I'm quite sure Pierre could tell us more about that.
But we know for certain that Fico's government in Slovakia talks in a very bad way about journalists. I think one of the finalists of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize was an investigation into that very fact. We know that Daphne has faced that. We knew it before the public inquiry. It is documented in the public inquiry.
Speaker 10
And people named by the public inquiry are in government and appointed to the editorial board of our public service broadcaster. I'm not familiar with, I don't understand Russian, so I'm not familiar with the media environment in Russia and what is being said there. But I'm quite sure Anna's experience was the same. She is honored more outside her country than inside it. And I think we could say that about every journalist who has been killed.
There were many in Italy. In their time, were they recognized for what they were? The recognition came later.
But before their death and after their death, there was an immediate attempt to undermine the investigations, to discredit the journalist, to blame anything and anyone. You see, anyone except the responsibility of the state to protect, to prevent. We don't need to wait for someone else to be killed. The test of whether there are good provisions to protect journalists is how safely a journalist can work after someone has been killed. But we should not wait for the next murder to understand whether those provisions work.
It's as Peter Kubina said about Slovakia. The same situation is coming back in Slovakia, but it's not just Slovakia. It is happening more and more in other countries too. This is, this is, I don't have an immediate answer, but we can do things and we are not doing those things. We should at least fight the disinformation, and that has to come from political leadership, not from the ground up.
Disinformation, call it by its name. Don't denigrate journalists. Yes, criticize the work of a journalist if it is not sound, if it is not correct, if it has led to an inaccurate outcome, but don't criticize journalism itself. There are politicians who are doing that, right? I have no solution, I'm afraid, but what we can do, we should be doing already.
Thank you, Corinna. As we are starting to run late, there is one last question for Vera, and then I propose that we close with the parents of Jan because they are not with us, whereas the rest of us can continue the discussion over coffee just after this. So, the last question, please.
Amaya Dimitrova
Amaya Dimitrova from the Bulgarian National Television. We were talking about justice. Do you think that there will be justice for your mother after all these years?
Matthew Caruana Galizia
I do think, I mean, one way or another... Sorry. Ah, sorry. Sorry. Well, it applies to both, I guess.
Matthew Caruana Galizia
Sorry, Vera. I do think so, yes. I mean, we should never give up on it because to do so just rolls out the red carpet for the next murder. So we should never give up on hoping for justice and working towards it.
Thank you, Matthew. Vera.
Vera
Я совершенно уверена в том, что правда однажды восторжествует. Нынешняя система в России, она как бы точно не позволит вскрыться заказчику, потому что он наверняка находится в высоких властных кругах. Но то, что это однажды произойдет, я уверена, потому что все системы, жесткие системы, они рушатся рано или поздно. Люди, которые раньше не говорили, начинают говорить. И однажды мы точно узнаем фамилию заказчика убийства Анны Политковской.
Raffaella
I think we can just address the same question to Jozef and Jana.
Do you think that you will see justice for Ján and Martina?
Jozef Kuciak
Keby sme si tým neboli istí, tak by sme to už boli dávno vzdali a veríme, že pravda vždy zvíťazí, aj keď to niekedy dlho trvá a stojí to čas aj námahu, ale stojí to vždy za to, lebo ide hlavne o to, aby sa nič podobné zopakovať nemohlo, aby si to uvedomili aj páni politici, ktorí vykrikujú z tých tribún, že za všetko môžu novinári, aké robia oni chyby, tak za to môže novinár, lebo niekomu nadržia, ako u nás naši politici tvrdia, že sú to zo západu nasadení špióni. Čo z nich urobili u nás z novinárov, lovnú zver pomaly. Je to žiaľ smutné, ale je to tak, ale všetko sa raz zmení a nádej vždy musí byť a dobro musí zvíťaziť. Ďakujem.
Thanks.
Raffaella
Thanks to all of you for this hopeful and combative message. I am glad Pina Picierno is back because we are here to tell you that this prize, along also to the fellowship of the European Parliament that honors the memory of Ján Kuciak, our traineeship in journalism are called after Ján, our press room is called after Daphne. And all this is not only to say that we want to keep the lights on, but also that we are aware that a free journalist and freedom of press is a pillar of our democratic society and that's what the Parliament stands for. So thanks to all of you. Thanks to our guests online and to those who are here.
We can have a small coffee and then we start with the finalists of the Daphne and with Eka as well from Georgia. So please let's be quick with the coffee.
Czech Center for Investigative Reporting and Dark Riviera presents Protagonista by Pavla Holcová.
Speaker 36
Can you please take your seat back again? Can you please sit? Impossible.
Speaker 34
Vale. Pero son los dos primeros, o sea... Son finalistas que van a hablar de Rusia.
Raffaella
Can we please take our seats back little by little? And then I would like to invite to the podium Eka Vestitadze. This is the most difficult name of today. So sorry for that. And I also would like to invite the first two finalists that will present their work because then we pass to one speaker to the other one without too many changes, Alice Pesavento and Andy Vermaut.
Can you please come so that we don't have too many moves? Okay. So while people get back in little by little, maybe we can start, Jesús, because otherwise we're always late with this seminar, too many things to say.
Jesus
But I would like first to thank all the precedent interventions because they've been very, very powerful, very touching. And it recognizes the need for continuing protecting the freedom of press in the European Parliament. That's what we are doing. So thank you very much. This second part of our seminar is, well, has two parts, I would say.
We are going to hear this year's ten finalists of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize. They will provide us with a snapshot of their investigations. The prize, which is now in its sixth edition, reflects Parliament's commitment to safeguarding press freedom and the work of journalists. But before giving the floor to the finalists, I would like to give the floor to Eka Sesitashvili. Thank you very much.
Georgian names are very hard to pronounce, that's the problem. Okay, thank you. You are the founder and director of the independent news-focused YouTube channel and podcast Mismine. Mismine, as it means in Georgian, listen to me, écoutez. Écoutez.
Well, listen to me. And after years of working as a TV presenter and in social media in Georgia, she became a target of disinformation and shaming campaign. So we are very happy to listen to your testimony, Eka, please.
Eka Sesitashvili
First of all, thank you very much. Bina, thank you very much for inviting me at this very important forum to represent the voice of Georgian journalist. Today we heard the tragic stories of journalists who were killed for doing their jobs. But I would like to ask you a question: how do you silence journalist before you arrest or kill them? Sometimes it looks remarkably ordinary, almost banal.
Months of unpaid salaries, a television studio with water leaking through the roof, journalists who still turn up for work every morning but they don't know how much longer they can carry on. This is the everyday reality of independent journalists in Georgia.
But financial pressure is only part of the story. The latest extraordinary step taken by Georgia's authoritarian government has been to target very words journalists use. Media outlets now face heavy fines for using words and expressions from a list of 93 disputed terms. Can you imagine? Words such as political prisoners, repressive laws, oligarch, judicial clan, unlawful detention.
Yesterday, just before I traveled here, my friend and colleague, television presenter Vakho Sanaia, was detained for 30 days over a Facebook post, an act of defiance against restriction on freedom of expression. Another colleague, Nika Gvaramia, who has become a symbol of integrity and resistance in Georgian journalism, has been in prison for 21 months now. For those who may be less familiar with Georgia, let me briefly explain how we reached this point. Since 2012, Georgia has been dominated by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia in the 90s.
Although he has held formal office only briefly, he remains the country's de facto ruler, exercising decisive influence over its political life. From the early years of his rule, we witnessed a slow drift towards authoritarianism. But after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as Ivanishvili increasingly aligned himself with Russia, the process accelerated dramatically. We found ourselves in an environment of severe political pressure, where the challenge was no longer simply to protect investigative journalism, but to preserve free critical media at all. The so-called Russian laws adopted in 2024 and 25 made the situation even worse.
They introduced foreign agent registration requirements for certain media and civil society, while placing foreign funding under government control. Think about the absurdity of it: asking a government for permission to receive the money you need to investigate and hold the same government to account.
Let me give you an example how independent media in Georgia has been gradually pushed towards collapse. In 2018, before Georgia's presidential election, I was hosting a political talk show on Rustavi 2, then country's most popular TV channel. During an interview, I confronted Ivanishvili with documents and photographs showing the wealth of influential figure in his government. He was visibly irritated and he said, I quote, "If Rustavi 2 were switched off today, you would see nothing in this country except progress and development." In that one sentence, he revealed his vision of a country without independent media.
He understood that as long as a popular critical television channel existed, it would be much harder to dominate the public narrative and consolidate his power. In 2019, Rustavi 2 changed ownership and television station we had built ceased to exist in its original form. Hundred of us, journalists, producers and technical staff had to start again. And incredibly so, we launched a new television channel in just 19 days.
Mtavari Arkhi became extremely popular, but we had lost part of our audience while the government propaganda machine was growing stronger. Ivanishvili had achieved at least part of what he wanted. What followed was a gradual financial strangulation of independent media. During those years, I can hardly remember a month when my colleague and I did not ask ourselves a simple question: will we survive another month? Eventually, the answer was no.
After Rustavi 2, we lost Mtavari Arkhi as well. Now another independent television channel, Formula, is struggling to survive. Its journalists have gone months without salaries. Water leaks into its studio. Yet people continue to work because they know what another closure would mean for independent journalism in Georgia.
When Mtavari Arkhi closed, I realized that moving to another television station would mean facing the same uncertainty all over again. So I decided to take a different path.
I wanted to build something smaller, more flexible, and better able to survive under authoritarian pressure. This is how I created Mismine, Listen to Me, a YouTube channel with several podcasts. Alongside Georgian and international politics, we began producing programs about history and literature. This was a deliberate choice. When authoritarian governments use history as a tool of manipulation, understanding the past becomes essential.
And literature helps us reflect on the values and personal responsibilities on which a free society depends, because democracy can only survive when enough people genuinely believe in those values, have the resilience to defend them, and a feel a sense of purpose, however small their individual contribution may be. And I found my own small mission in creating this platform. It was also a way of giving our audience a hope. They had shut down our television station, but we had found another way to survive. Yet surviving was far from easy.
Finding funding under the new foreign agent laws became an enormous challenge. When I first approached the EU delegation for help, I was told, "We really want to support you, we like you, but at this moment we don't know how to do this."
"But we will find a way, in the meantime you have to survive." Of course, easier said than done. One of the few options left to us was to turn to private businesses to support. But the business community had become so intimidated that even people I knew personally were afraid to answer a text message. Fortunately, a few people did find the courage to help us, openly or discreetly.
But there were days when, now as a head of media organization, I found myself asking the same old question: we may survive this month, but what about the next? Not everyone can endure the kind of pressure indefinitely. Over the past few years, dozen of my journalist colleagues have left Georgia along with countless other professionals. And sometime you begin to ask yourself the same question: will my struggle make any difference? Should I leave too?
Could I endure prison, or maybe more? Am I prepared for this? And perhaps the hardest question of all: is it fair to put my children through this constant fear?
My children still remember the day when dozens of people gathered outside our home shouting insults at me through megaphones. Those are the moments when the cost of your choice becomes painfully personal. But then you realize that what keeps us going is one another. How can I walk away from Gvanca Maghlaperidze, from Zviad Ratiani, a remarkable, a great poet who deliberately risked imprisonment in solidarity with her? From the hundreds of others in prison, some of them refuse even to ask for a pardon because they refuse to compromise their principles.
Their courage gives us the strength to continue. But courage and idealism alone will not be enough to win this struggle. We are being worn down day after day. The stress, intimidation, uncertainty, and financial pressure can eventually become unbearable. And people begin asking increasingly desperate questions.
Is there any hope? Does anyone still remember us? The struggle for liberal democracy has become a shared challenge for people who believe in freedom regardless of their country or nationality.
We follow developments elsewhere with extraordinary interest: elections, protests, victories and defeats. We feel that these struggles are connected to our own, because the future of free world is also shaped by what happens in countries that may seem small or distant. Examples spread, so do methods of repression. When a government finds an effective way to silence independent media in one country, that method can be copied elsewhere. And that is why we need much stronger solidarity and much more effective support.
We cannot rely indefinitely on individual heroism, resilience and commitment to democratic values. It's impossible to keep going forever when enormous financial resources and powerful propaganda machines are working against you, while you cannot even afford to repair your studio's roof or pay your journalists. The reality is that authoritarian government often find new ways to restrict independent media faster than democratic institution develop new ways to protect it.
While we are still searching for ways to provide help, television stations are closing, journalists are leaving their countries, and independent voices are disappearing. So we should not measure the effectiveness of support simply how much money has been allocated. We must ask a different question: did that support actually reach the people who needed it, and did it reach them in time?
Jesus
Thank you very much, Eka, for sharing your own story. By the way, I have to remind that Ms. Amaglobeli, she was awarded with the Sakharov Prize last year by the European Parliament. And now we are going to move to the next part of our program for this afternoon. We are going to hear this year's ten finalists of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism. I would like also to welcome David Casa, who is one of our MEPs from Malta and who was at the origin of the prize.
So thank you for joining us, David. And let's start.
Raffaella
I have to put the rules of the game because this is going to be a marathon, so we all need a bit of discipline. So I will introduce the works that you will present and you will have only three minutes to present your pitch. And Eva, my colleague there, will make you a sign when we are finishing the second minute so that you know that you have to finish. It is the only way that we can present the ten finalists and give also a bit of space for Q and A. So thanks a lot to all of you to play the game.
We will start by connecting to Eka, of course, and that's why we are starting on the two works that speak of Russia and Russian tricks in general, how they manage to somehow, let's say, play against the rules of the game. And in the case of Alice, your work with Katarina, who's also in the room, I think, is investigating Russia's secrets, how Putin protects his nuclear weapons, and has been published in NDR, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Germany, along other European media.
So Alice the floor is yours.
Alice Pesavento
Hi everyone. We are actually here today to represent a team of 30 journalists that worked on this all together on this very big investigation. And basically to try to summarize it what we did was we uncovered that Russia had been deploying a secret underwater surveillance system in the Barents Sea which is far up north in the Arctic to support its nuclear weapons and submarines. And not only did they deploy this but they did this with Western technology that they basically shopped all over Europe but also the US and in Japan. This investigation started with a court process in Germany and last year colleagues from NDR received the court documents.
And they looked at them. It was a court case against a businessman who was accused of evading sanctions and basically channeling equipment via Cyprus and a company network to Russia for a secret military project. And when our colleagues received these documents they found among other things a company in there which was based in Cyprus called Mostrello.
And then they found out that the ICIJ actually has a leak with all of the company data basically from this company. So this was very helpful. And then we had colleagues who went through these hundreds of documents to look at which equipments they bought, which ships they bought to deploy this system. And then like a month-long investigation started where we worked with a lot of media, other media outlets. You can see all of them up here.
And what was very special about this investigation was that we used a lot of different investigative techniques. So for example, Katharina and I, we were part of the OSINT and data team. We did a lot of ship tracking. We tried to prove that they actually used this equipment that were in the documents for this specific system. But then we had colleagues who did other types of investigative reporting, HUMINT.
They talked to sources. And this way we could always check our different findings. And here you can see the final map of this system that we drew basically. The long strings are cables, underwater cables that we found through different techniques like ship tracking and even on LinkedIn.
You might be surprised what seafarers post on there. We could find a lot of the equipment that we had in the documents on LinkedIn because people were reporting that they were working with them and even while they were on ships that were deploying this and they even wrote that they deployed cables. So yeah, it was a very fun investigation. It profited a lot from all the different teams and from collaborating. Yeah, if there are questions, feel free.
Raffaella
Thank you, Alice. I know it's difficult to sum up such a huge work in few minutes. We pass to Andy. Andy Vermout, you are a Belgian journalist, you published in de-gazette.be and your work is about Zeebrugge, so Belgian still being the most important European arrival port for Russian polar gas.
Andy Vermout
Ladies and gentlemen, Europe has repeatedly promised to reduce its dependence on Russian energy. But what happens when we follow the ships instead of the political statements? My investigation for de-gazette.be revealed that Zeebrugge in Belgium remains Europe's leading individual arrival port for Russian Arctic liquefied natural gas.
During the period I examined, 136 shipments of LNG from Russia's Yamal project arrived in European Union ports. 37 of those shipments reached Zeebrugge alone. While European leaders were discussing how to end Russian energy dependence, European companies continued purchasing enormous quantities of Russian gas. The estimated value of these purchases reached almost 6 billion euros in six months' time. And instead of declining, the number of shipments actually increased by 16% compared with the same period in the previous year.
This investigation is not simply about ships, ports, or energy. It's about accountability. It raises an uncomfortable question: how can Europe credibly defend its political commitments while its energy infrastructure continues to facilitate trade with Russia?
Journalism has a responsibility. It has a responsibility to investigate that contradiction. To examine the data and to follow the money. And to ask questions that those in power may prefer not to answer. Because the public, the public deserves to know not only what Europe promises, but what Europe actually does.
Thank you.
Thank you, Andy. Maybe Jesus, before giving the floor to our...
Jesus
Yeah, I forgot to mention our special guests today, who are the jury of the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize. They are here. They have had the hard work of selecting amongst the ten finalists a winner. So I would like to thank you for your work and appreciation for what you are doing since the beginning of this prize. And now...
Yes. Of course. And we have to remind that there was the highest number of submissions this year, 344. So the prize is gaining recognition and also visibility. And the independence of this prize is in the hands of this jury.
Raffaella
So now, if you have questions for Alice and Andy, we are happy to take them. Please.
So we are all grateful to you. Thanks.
Speaker 42
Hi, I'm a journalist from Lithuania. I wanted to ask both of the journalists from Belgium and Germany, could you please tell us about the reactions after your investigations was published? Do was, you know, some impact of this, what changed after?
Andy Vermout
Well, actually I started in 2022 already asking questions. I also asked it to the local mayor in Diksmuide because all the cities are benefiting from this Russian gas contract, all the cities in Belgium. And the answer that I got is that it was very difficult to do something about it because these were contracts made before the war. This was in 2022. So they could still do something.
Speaker 41
We are now 2024 and there is only complete silence. Silence also says something.
Alice Pesavento
Yeah, I mean, our investigation showed that when sanctions are evaded, it's not only towards Ukraine and a problem towards Ukraine, but in the worst case, it can be towards other European countries. Regarding reactions, I know that, for example, in Norway, there were inquiries because the company that was providing equipment or that equipment was sold to Russia from was also partly from the state. But other than that, to be honest, I'm not sure about other like big reactions, but it was received with a lot of concern.
Speaker 43
For Alice, how did you coordinate a group of journalists that big, practically?
Alice Pesavento
Well, luckily, I didn't have to coordinate. We had Benedict Strunz, our colleague from NDR. He was like responsible to coordinate all of these journalists from all of these teams. We had weekly calls, basically, where the teams from each country updated each other. It was like a big call and everyone would go around and talk about what we found or what we still need.
And then we had different Signal groups, one big one and then smaller ones with the OSINT team, which basically Katharina and I mainly used.
It was just a lot of messages of everyone writing what they found, what we need. We tried to organize it in a shared like drive or something to have some kind of organization, but yeah, it was very difficult to be honest.
David Abioye
Hi, David Abioye, journalist. I had a question about the, so you're writing and sometimes you're touching on legal subjects or, no, sorry, SLAPPs, fear of SLAPPs, self-censorship when you're formulating a phrase, checking things. How much does that influence you and how much is it pushing you to step away from saying things that you know, but you're not 99.999% sure, well you are 99% sure, but not 100% sure or fearful of the consequences?
Andy Vermout
For example, the gas contracts, they are secret. So we can't officially know what's in it.
But I compared it with the gas prices in the Netherlands. So it was around 27 euros per megawatt hour, between 27 euros per megawatt hour and 52 euros per megawatt hour. So you can, you can never be sure that these figures are right, but you can make an estimation. And I contacted multiple players to know that my estimation was good. I contacted Ursa World, I contacted Kepler, and these people said this was a good estimation.
So you are never 100% sure of some of the figures, but you make an estimation based on a scientific basis. And you make a thing, and so this is, this is something that I've done in my case.
Alice Pesavento
For the case of our investigation, I can remember that we, for example, had discussions which companies we name, or if we can name them, because the companies themselves, did they know that this would go to Russia, was it their job to check this? But I can only speak for us at NDR, we are from the German public broadcaster and we have a legal team, so we always were exchanging with them. They were checking our stuff. They were not trying to censor us or anything.
They were just trying to find a way that we can say as much while not getting into legal problems, basically. But in terms of protection also of sources or other journalists, we, for example, deliberately didn't include someone from Russia or we decided to not contact certain people in Russia to not endanger them, like, for example, the people we found on LinkedIn, seafarers. They posted this publicly, but we decided at some point, okay, we have the information that we need, they posted this publicly, there is no need to contact all of them and ask for more information.
Raffaella
Thank you, Alicia. As my timekeeper tells me, we have to close this panel, but the good thing is we are spending the afternoon and even the evening together, so this conversation can continue and keep inspiring us in the coming hours. Thanks a lot, Eka, as well for being with us. And I would like to pass to the second panel, but before, I think that we have to also give an applause to our two finalists here.
Okay, so please on the stage I would like to invite Gian-Paolo Accardo, Giacomo Zandonini, Nico Schmidt and Maite Vermeulen. What these four reports have in common is the fact that you are putting the light on institutional issues, on how the institutions, both the European but also national, play a role in our public space and how journalism and investigative journalism is there to expose possible dysfunctions of our public institution. And this is a key role of journalism and we are very glad that the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize contributes to also give visibility to works that may be critical also towards the EU because that's what your work is for. So Gian-Paolo, your work is about war made sustainable, how green investment funds have supported arms industry with the EU backing. And your coordination for Voxeurop has allowed to work together with media like El País and Mediapart and so on.
Speaker 50
Thank you. So now my pitch can be short for the sake of everyone. Sorry, I'm a bit kind of impostor here because I'm not the author of the investigation, I'm the editor. The authors could not come, but sometimes editing takes as much time as reporting. So imagine you're an environmental or social savvy investor.
You want to put your savings into a green fund that is promoted by your bank, and you want to support climate, environmental, or social friendly activities. Well, we found that there is a non-zero possibility that your green money ended up in a company that produces either missiles or tanks or even armed drones.
As you saw the figures that were displayed in the in the video, there's almost 50 billion euros of green funds that were that ended up in the defense industry in 2025. So, we followed the paper trail that led to a massive lobbying campaign that was entitled "No sustainability without security" by the defense industry. And the European Commission the European Commission ended up echoing this slogan in its own documents. The powerful defense lobby also took advantage of some loopholes in the EU Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation that doesn't expressly prohibit investing in most defense applications, such as we saw tanks, missiles, or armed drones. The beneficiary companies are the most known defense companies in Europe, like French Safran, German's Rheinmetall, Italy's Leonardo, and Israeli's Elbit Systems.
The top investors the top investors include the ESG Top World Fund by DWS in Germany, and also France Montpensier Arbevel. The investigation, as we see, was published in collaboration with several other European media, which gave it a bit more reach than our usual one. And it has also been awarded a prize for the best investigation in 2026 Voices Festival.
Thanks. Thanks for being so short but so comprehensive.
And now the floor goes to Giacomo Zandonini. You are here on a double hat, Giacomo, but please on this panel present your investigation: They protect the law while breaking it inside Europol shadow IT system.
Giacomo Zandonini
Thank you so much, Raffaella. And while preparing this short speech, I thought probably this is one of the few rooms and places in the Parliament where I don't have to explain what Europol is and does, because it's a key security agency of the European Union, but most of European citizens don't know about it. Still, it's very important to look at this agency and to investigate it.
What we have come across is something that probably we didn't know and probably you didn't know or you don't know if you haven't read the investigation yet is that over a period of about 10 years at least the agency had built a parallel data processing system to store and analyze data that are supposedly part of criminal investigations. But as you can see from this slide, we received a document from 2019 which we were quite shocked about that this parallel system which was not official, was not declared and so was not respecting basic data protection rules and also presented several security flaws is the one in red here. So it was 400 bigger in 2019 than the official what we can call the IT system of Europol. So not only a database but a place where data, a digital space where data and personal data are processed. And this has happened in 2019 but we kept following this and in one point on the same year, you can read it at the end of this slide which is part of an email, an internal email that we received from some of our sources, they disclosed or they were extremely concerned that if it would come to light the existence of this parallel IT system or shadow system, then the whole activity of Europol would be blocked.
So it's an incredible security risk for the European Union, given that Europol owns very sensitive data of citizens, of governments, of law enforcement across Europe. And this continued for years. And despite repeated warnings by officials of Europol, basically there was no action or very limited actions. An email we received from 2022 about a part, a portion of this system, which is called the pressure cooker, said that this might soon be discovered by the European Data Protection Supervisor. And of course, there were internal discussions that this would be a risk for the agency as well.
We try to then come to today, why it's important this story for what happens today in European policing. Because of course, for years this system has been kept completely hidden. The person responsible for this, the former deputy director Jürgen Ebner, is now running to become the next director of Europol, executive director of Europol, even though there will be a final rotation and the Parliament is part of this, of course.
And this issue, we believe, according and our sources confirm it, it's not completely dealt with. So we think it's important to keep investigating this, despite Europol qualified our investigation as a misrepresentation of the facts and a misleading characterization in a nice blog post they published a few months after the publication. Thank you so much.
This all raises a lot of questions. I hope the room will take advantage. The next one is Nico Schmidt, that he's here with his colleague Ella Joyner. And his work is dealing on Big Tech and how Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centers' environmental toll, by Investigate Europe. Nico.
Nico Schmidt
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, and as you said, basically the story I did together with my colleague Ella, who's also here. Yeah, so I think, and maybe we can, yeah, we can see the next slide. So what you see on this slide is a data center seen from above, which maybe some of you are not yet able to identify as a data center. After having worked on this project for a long time, it is one of the things that I dream about now at night.
So, yeah, well, let's start. The EU basically has the political goal to over the next five to seven years triple the capacity of data centers in Europe. And I think in many countries, many conversations that I have, in times of economic weakness, data centers are seen as a symbol of innovation, progress, investment. And at the same time, they already, they also promise huge revenues for Big Tech. There are estimates that say the revenues or the investments around data centers are going to be 300 billion euros over the next five years.
However, at the same time, there are also unknown consequences of this massive data center build-up for the environment and for the economy, such things as water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, the utilization, so basically the question how much are these data centers actually running at capacity, but also questions around ownership and sovereignty. All of these are yet to be answered.
And basically what we were able to see is that there's a law called the Energy Efficiency Directive, and this law has an article that puts all of the information that operators of data centers have to submit every year on their environmental impacts to the EU hidden. They cannot be accessed by journalists, they cannot be accessed by citizens. And this law article, we later on found out, and you can see it on the graphic behind me, was written by Big Tech. So Microsoft and DigitalEurope, which is a lobby organization that has amongst its members Amazon, Microsoft, and also Google, they wrote a proposal for a law article to be added to a first draft that was then word-for-word added by the Commission. You could also say it was almost copy-pasted into the final law.
And this little article makes all of the information on data centers secret. We spoke to a number of international law experts who said that this is most likely violating international legal obligations of the European Union, for example under the Aarhus Convention that is mandating access to environmental information.
What we later also saw were a number of emails that the EU Commission sent to member states, because member states also have access to this information, and in these emails the Commission told member states not to share this information. So I think it's fair enough to pose the question who the Commission is serving here, Big Tech or its own citizens. What happened after the publication of the story, there was also, you can see the logos, it's quite cool, I have to say, that all of these outlets decided to publish our small story, but yeah, it was published across Europe and then there was a larger number of MEPs that actually demanded change from the Commission. The head of the European Environmental Agency also demanded change, but yeah, so far nothing has happened, unfortunately, and we are now working on actually revealing these impacts that I mentioned. I mean, we will not get access to the database, we have to be so realistic, but now together with these outlets you can see there, we are currently working on trying to bring a bit more light to the impacts that this massive build-up of data centers across Europe has.
Raffaella
Thanks to you and congratulations. And now the last one. So these three works were more focusing on EU, let's say, wrongdoings, if we can say so. This one is more related to national politics. So Maite Vermeulen, together with Giacomo, but also other colleagues you worked with.
Caged, Castaway: This is Europe's innovative solution for unwanted migrants.
Maite Vermeulen
Thank you, thank you very much. Yeah, so Giacomo has two nominations, so we did this project together, but I'll summarize it for you today. So our investigation that we did for De Correspondent, which is a Dutch media platform, is about the migration deal that Italy and Albania signed in November 2023. The deal basically authorizes Italy to build two facilities on Albanian territory to manage migrants. So Italy's goal is to intercept these migrants at sea who are on their way to Italy and to ship them to these facilities in Albania, which is a country outside the EU, as you know, and from there take them through an expedited asylum procedure and deport them back to their home country as soon as possible.
It has been called an innovative solution and a blueprint for future migration policy across Europe by many European politicians and by Ursula von der Leyen as well. But despite the fact that this deal has been described as a model or a blueprint, it turned out to be very difficult to report on what the model actually looked like. Journalists are denied access to the Italian centers in Albania. All sorts of basic information, such as how many people are being detained there, is not made public. Expenditures are made through emergency procedures, meaning that they're not subject to public bidding that journalists could look at.
So this deal has been a flagship project for the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Maite Vermeulen
Staff members sign non-disclosure agreements and so on. Despite this, we've in our investigation we have uncovered a lot of information about the deal that was not public before. We submitted dozens of freedom of information requests in six European countries and with multiple European institutions. We compiled tried to compile a list of the money spent in the first year of the deal based on tender documents, on official deliberations, on press releases, that puts the price of the deal in the first year at about 1 million euro per migrant held in Albania. And we managed to speak to a migrant who was actually detained there.
So our investigation reveals that the situation of the people held in Albania is really nothing short of shocking.
Maite Vermeulen
People are detained without knowing for how long. They are not allowed to receive visitors. To cope with the stress, they are prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills, which leaves some of them barely responsive. In the first two months after the opening of the facility, there were 12 suicide attempts that were recorded among detained people. So when Italy started sending migrants to Albania, both Italian and European courts actually blocked this practice because it's not legal.
But this year, new European laws have been passed that remove many of the legal obstacles to send people from the EU to countries they have never been to. In other words, these new laws have opened the door to more Albania-like detention facilities. And a lot of countries in the EU are really looking at opening these in the coming months. So this makes our research more relevant than ever. And we hope that it can also serve as a warning for governments across Europe and as a kind of wake-up call to the consequences of these types of migration deals.
Thanks, thanks to all of you for trying to expose the dark sides of power and keep it accountable. I am sure there will be questions.
Raffaella
Personally, I have several. So if nobody raises the hand, I will take my power as moderator to ask you. No, I would like to really ask to all of you what were the reactions from the institutions that are involved to your investigations. Of course, the Commission, Giacomo mentioned a bit about Europol, but where is this taking it? I mean, for example, is EDPS opening an actual investigation on what happens in Europol after your work?
And the same about, of course, Italy and the Commission. So all of you on the institutional reactions.
Giacomo Zandonini
Yeah, I will start. Thank you, Raffaella.
I think when it comes to the investigation, the Europol shadow IT system, we had members of the Parliament raising questions within the LIBE committee and trying to organize a hearing with the Commission, but there was no majority to do it, so it didn't move on. The EDPS has already scrutinized and is mandated with scrutinizing the activity of Europol, but in this case, they haven't, at least officially, acted as far as we know. And the Commission hasn't fully replied to either our requests, and then of course there was no occasion for the Commission to be questioned by Parliament members. So I think somehow the story remains there, but it was not picked up enough, I think, to hold the agency accountable. Might I?
When it comes to our work with Might and the correspondent on Albania, it was complete silence by the Italian government, for sure.
The Commission commented, offered some basic information on how they consider this experience as a blueprint, as a model, but then they didn't react to our investigation. So, which is, we believe, part of the structural opacity around this deal, and that's why also the work of journalists and policymakers is so important to shed light on this type of project.
Nico Schmidt
Yeah, maybe I can add for our project. So, there wasn't much of a reaction from the EU Commission, which is, I guess, to be expected. However, what happened afterwards is that the EU Commission, they proposed a new delegated act under the Energy Efficiency Directive. So I don't know how many of you are aficionados of EU lawmaking and all of its, you know, processes. But basically, if there is what I would call now a normal law under the EU, there's a trilogue process, and if you have a delegated act, that is not happening.
A delegated act comes by the Commission, and then the Parliament, for example, has the opportunity to object. But they have to object to a delegated act as a whole, and a delegated act is some modifications in the law.
So now there's a proposal for some modifications in the Energy Efficiency Directive, but the parts that are being modified are not the parts that are controversial. So all of this secrecy around data centers would still continue. And we are right now in this phase where actually the EU Parliament would have the chance to object. So they could say, look, dear Commission, the law that you are here proposing is largely or in part not compatible with other legal obligations that we have, so we might not move forward with this one. However, that would take a Parliament that is actually willed to take action.
So what I know is that the Parliament now following our reporting has at least asked for a longer period of time to consider their chance to come forward with an objection. If they're going to do it in the current political reality that we have in the Parliament, I think is more than doubtful. But yeah, this is where we are. Also maybe to mention that after our publication another journalistic organization called Lighthouse Reports, they actually decided to kind of based on these findings bring forward some legal action under the Aarhus Convention. However, I mean, that is a nice thing to happen.
It's more symbolic, however, as these procedures, as we heard earlier, unfortunately legal procedures take an incredible long time and by the time this is being decided most likely most of these data centers will have been built and will not be torn down again.
Speaker 50
I might add to the general frustration with the comment by we had, of course, a comment by the Commission. A financial services spokesman told us that the EU sustainable finance framework places no impediments on private investments in the defense sector, except, of course, for controversial weapons, meaning nuclear, okay, landmines and chemical weapons. So basically nothing much has changed in the Commission's position. And looking at the political spectrum right now and the political situation, we believe that nothing will change anyway. I must also point out that this is, I feel, a general tendency of those who should be held accountable lately not to change their behavior.
It is true for the European institutions, but even more for the national ones when they are taking into account simply because there is possibly no public opinion support or not sufficient, or they feel they can go away with it. I mean, we saw that they can go away with practically everything. And this is why we need more support also from the public opinion.
Thank you. There are a couple of questions in the room. The lady behind and then you. Okay.
No, no, you, you.
Irina Nedeva
It's me? Okay. Thank you. My name is Irina Nedeva, working with Bulgarian Public Radio and also part of Association of European Journalists, Bulgaria and the international organization. Well, one observation.
Speaker 56
Obviously, we face a reality where the secrets are so big that we need armies of journalists to deal with these secrets and closed doors. And second question, actually, my question is, did you face any kind of pressure not to publish, or any kind of warnings that it is dangerous, that there might be some consequences, etc.?
Thank you.
Michaela Terenzani
I'm Michaela Terenzani, journalist from Slovakia, and I got intrigued by what you just mentioned about the lack of institutional response. Okay, hello. What we see with my colleagues in Slovakia also that we are publishing stories that 10, 15 years ago would provoke an outcry and outrage among the public, now just go unnoticed. And it's often enough for politicians and for institutions to just wait it out, you know, and within a week, mostly thanks to the impact of how social media shape the way we communicate, it just goes away and people are not interested. Is this your experience too?
Do you see public interest in investigative journalism and its outcomes change over time? And how do you find the, where do you go for the motivation to go on and to investigate further stories if you don't see that much impact? Thanks.
Raffaella
Very good question. Who wants to start? Maybe Nico, we do in this order.
Nico Schmidt
Okay, yeah. So maybe to answer to the first one, big tech companies are extremely silent when it comes to answering your requests, but luckily so far they have also been extremely silent when it comes to threats, so we didn't get any of those. When it comes kind of to what you said about political institutions, it's very true. You know, by now the common modus operandi with the EU Commission is that you ask questions to a spokesperson, you get the answers, but then there is sometimes you cannot quote us. Like this is like official press answer to your question, you cannot quote it.
It's insane. And I think it's kind of interesting the question around data centers. It might be a little bit different from stories, for example, around migration, because data centers are something that is quite interesting that you can see already in the US, where there's like bipartisan opposition to data centers. I think this comes from the fact that there's something tangible when it comes, for example, to AI and to certain developments in our society and people all of a sudden seeing something emerging that is physical and where they feel they can have some kind of agency as a community to oppose it. And I think this is somehow what keeps people engaged in this.
This is my understanding. I think it's somehow really once, and it's not only for this subject, but I think once there are communities that start to form and you as journalists can become part of this community without kind of losing your objectiveness, you know, but kind of maybe, yeah, I don't know how to say, but get closer to your readership in this sense, then something fruitful can exist where people don't feel so hopeless maybe. Yeah.
Giacomo.
Giacomo Zandonini
Yes, thank you. Yeah, I kind of, yeah, echoing what Nico was saying, when we are facing silence by institutions, particularly institutions tasked with doing something, like the European Commission, for example, in this case, I think, yeah, another level is just trying to get readers involved, the public. And of course, for example, with a story like the one we did on Europol, it appears as very technical somehow. And what works and worked in the past, for example, is to explain and to show what could be the impact, because of course we believe that the police or a big security agency will go after criminals and terrorists. So, yeah, everybody's happy, but when it comes to reality, within this big parallel system, there's been data of activists, of people that were passing by close to a scene of crime, maybe in the area of a few kilometers, and phone data ended up being stored there.
So I think that this helps, and as journalists, we also need to engage with the public, with readers, with groups and communities that can be affected, and this also kind of helps us motivate ourselves. We're serving not only the policymakers that have to be informed, but of course the general public that needs to have an opinion on what policies are decided and where and why and how.
So potentially the data of all of us.
Maite Vermeulen
Thanks for your questions. As to governments trying to suppress our reporting, not so much from the Italian side, it was mainly silence, I think. From the Dutch side, actually, we did a large FOI request with the Dutch government to see if they were also interested in sending migrants to Albania, which turned out to be the case when we got the documents. Of course, the Dutch government was maybe not very happy with that, but a lot of the civil servants who were involved in the FOI request actually were. They were really like cheering us on to get this information out because I do think that also within institutions, there are people who are concerned about the direction that these institutions are taking.
So I thought that was very interesting.
And then as for public interest in the story, well, I don't think there's ever lack of public interest in anything to do with migration recently, or for a very long time actually. I do think that this particular story kind of could give ammunition to both right and left-wing ideas about migration because the amount of insane public spending on something that is clearly not working is maybe something that some right-wing politicians might also be concerned about, whereas left-wing politicians might be more concerned about the human costs that we exposed. But I do think that for me personally, the fact that there is so much debate about migration is only only motivates me more to write stories that actually expose facts and and and show that it's people we're talking about and and not just scapegoats for for other problems in our society.
Speaker 50
So, on your first point, pressure, no pressure ever. That's the good thing with being a small and independent media.
You don't feel the pressure anyway, either because the corporations or the governments that are held accountable think that you are too small and not interesting enough. With regards to the interests of the public opinion, yeah, but the public opinion is flooded with news and entertainment, info-news, that to stand out among that magma of information is quite hard. And this is why we rely on larger media to support our investigations. The motivation is duty, basically, I guess. Money, not so much.
And you mentioned, Irina, an army of journalists. Yes, we need of course an army of journalists, but investigative journalism is very expensive and legacy media don't have much money to dedicate to that. So most of media rely on grants. But there aren't that many grants around. I mean, our investigation was supported by IJ4EU, which is a EU-supported grant.
The EU is by the way one of the largest supporter of journalism in Europe through mediators, of course, not directly, which leads me to the current discussions around the budget. You know that there is Agora EU, which is the big program that should be funding also journalism, and there are discussions about shrinking it, which means less money for journalism, independent journalism notably, and we strongly advocate for keeping Agora EU as big, as large as possible for in the interest of all of us, I think. Okay, this was the advocacy 10 seconds.
Raffaella
I believe our Vice-President has listened. Thanks, I have to say that this panel deserves a big applause too. We will all meet later in the ceremony and now let's move on. On the third panel we talk of platforms. There is something about big tech that was already mentioned, but this was another topic that has, let's say, focused the attention of investigative journalists in the last years.
So, Karin Kovariss Solimosh, Sergio Hernandez and Clara Jimenez Cruz, please come here with me.
And I would also like to call on the podium the last one, David Dusa, even if he's not dealing with platforms, but at least we don't change the podium too much. So, we clustered your work around the platforms because the issue of, of course, I mean, Vice-President Jourová has already mentioned disinformation, targeting of democratic debate to weaken our societies and to also political attacks on one hand and also algorithms in other, other problematic areas such as, for example, pedophilia and so on. All this is very, very actual and very critical in our society. Let's start with Karin Kőváry Sólymos, author of "Sponsored Hate: How Politicians Across Central Europe Use Paid Social Media to Attack Journalists, Civil Society and Spreading Disinformation and Hate". So, once again, we are in Slovakia and this is very relevant to our debate today.
Karin Kőváry Sólymos
And good afternoon and thank you. I think it's a really great honor to be nominated to this prize. And as I work for the Ján Kuciak Investigative Center and as a journalist from Slovakia, where a journalist was murdered, I know that even a murder of a journalist starts with words, and words really matter. Attacks on journalists are usually discussed as something that happens mostly around social media, online harassment, hostile comments, trolls. But with this investigation, we wanted to ask a kind of different question.
Thank you very much, Raffaella.
Karin Kőváry Sólymos
What happens when attacks on journalists are not just tolerated by the platforms, but paid for? And sometimes paid for by the people who run the country. That was the purpose of our investigation, Sponsored Hate. Together with my colleagues from Poland, Frontstory.pl, Czech Republic, investigace.cz, and VSquare, we set out to measure how politicians in the Visegrád Four use paid advertising to discredit and smear journalists, activists, and civil society organizations too, and also lie about them. Our goal was simple: to replace anecdote with evidence.
We analyzed tens of thousands of rows in Excel, tens of thousands of political ads, and we manually coded each one. What did we find? Nearly 800 hateful paid politician ads in just one year. And the problem was far from evenly spread. As you can see on the infographic, the situation was worst in Slovakia and Hungary.
I think it's not a big surprise, sadly. Almost 70% of the ads came from Slovakia, and the vast majority of those were paid by the government politicians, the government of Robert Fico and the parties involved in the government. In Hungary, some attacks were financed directly with public money also. I think it is a really sad example. Journalists were labeled as foreign agents, as part of the Soros network.
Karin Kőváry Sólymos
But we also see that in Poland and the Czech Republic, we saw far fewer of these attacks, which shows that these attacks are a political choice. And we know this is just the tip of the iceberg because the real number is even higher. We also saw evidence on the social media platforms that it's far more bigger, or it was far more bigger because, as you know, the political ads ended in the European Union.
What I think it's really important that the responsibility is shared. Politicians weaponize the social media platforms to attack journalists and also civil society, but the platforms are responsible too because they did not stop it, these attacks. Most of these attacks don't use explicit hate speech, they use enemy narratives such as traitor, foreign agent, spy, or liar. The platforms were not strict, much of this hate passed through moderation without even breaking the rules according to the platforms, and it stayed online even till today. The message was clear: for money, you could spread hate and the platforms profited from it, tens of thousands of euros from these attacks.
Paid political advertising in the EU ended, as I said, but the experts we spoke to warned that the underlying problem will remain: algorithms that reward polarizing content and networks of fake accounts that need no ad budget at all for a coordinated attack against journalists. So this investigation is not only about what happened, but I think it is also about what we must keep watching, and thank you for recognizing this work.
Raffaella
Very important point of view, thanks Karin. Let's move to Sergio Hernandez from Agencia EFE, that tried to prove how fake news can harm real lives and real people in different countries, so tell us.
Speaker 62
Fake news, real victims is a multimedia series that shows how misinformation and disinformation are not trivial, merely trivial social posts, but can cause devastating harm to people's lives. The series exposes that human cost through ten personal stories of victims across the world, four continents. Killings motivated by falsehoods and religious hatred, tragic consequences of misinformation about COVID vaccines, and scams targeting the most vulnerable are some of the cases we have told in Fake news, real victims. The series includes ten in-depth articles, ten eight-minute video documentaries, a podcast series, and an interactive microsite. The project also has an educational component with six media literacy workshops with 300 participants, more than 300 participants, and remarkable improvements in the measure of the resistance to misinformation and disinformation.
Speaker 63
To give you a look at these moving testimonies, let's watch a teaser video.
Thank you. Thank you, Sergio. I think a lot of questions and also remind us of these days with the riots and the fake news around this too.
And Clara, Clara Jiménez, nice to see you. Predators on TikTok: how a free hunting ground for more than 1,300 pedophiles.
Clara Jiménez Cruz
Thank you, Raffaella. Let me start by saying that this is not my investigation, this is a team effort, Maldita.es team, which is a non-profit organization based in Spain focused on information integrity and platform accountability. This is the second investigation we've run about pedophilia on TikTok and on TikTok's responsibility. In only 50 videos posted by kids on the platforms, we found over 1,300 pedophiles, profiles of adult men commenting and engaging to share, buy or sell child sexual abuse material. We know that's what they were doing because we contacted a random pick and they sent us their teaser material.
Speaker 64
We reported over 100 of those comments to TikTok for being illegal. TikTok agreed and erased 99% of them, but against its own policies they let those accounts online, so those pedophiles could continue finding each other and exchanging child sexual abuse materials on the platform.
We also found two other things. First, the tactics that the pedophiles were using on the platform to get hold of more material that was being sent to them by minors, and that also meant that grooming activities could be taking place. And secondly, that there were plenty of minors under 13 on the platform being approached by these pedophiles, even though TikTok says they shouldn't be there. We reported 35 accounts that publicly recognized on their videos or on their bios that they were under 13. We told TikTok that much, but TikTok did nothing in 97% of the cases.
So TikTok not only leaves pedophiles on the platform in which minors worldwide spend the most hours globally, but it also leaves under 13s on the platform accessible for them. This investigation was used by the Spanish government as evidence in the Council of Ministers to push action from the national prosecutor. Law enforcement in our country opened an investigation, and according to MLex, it was also used by the DSA enforcement team in their case against TikTok for under 13 users. This is what we do for these investigations. We look for social awareness, but we also want to provide evidence to enforcement teams so that companies like TikTok either feel the social pressure or are obliged by the law to protect children from predators on their platform.
It doesn't feel like an unreasonable ask. Yet, unfortunately, it seems we, as a small team of a non-profit organization in Spain, are faster than a multi-million company profiting from our societies. We're not done. Maldita's third investigation on pedophiles on TikTok is coming up November 10th. Thank you.
Raffaella
Thank you, and the more I hear, the more I think all of you would deserve the prize tonight. But okay, let's open the Q&A session before going to the last work that is a bit different. Yes, here in front, Nico and Giampaolo.
Nico Schmidt
Yeah, hi. That was super interesting, and when I heard these three stories, and you mentioned it now with kind of the last things you said, but I of course had to think about the Digital Services Act, the DSA.
So I wonder for your three stories, to what extent is the DSA actually addressing the problems and how much is it then being enforced in order to solve these problems?
Speaker 64
So indeed we have the DSA and I think that's a good piece of legislation. I'm going to put my policy hat on and take off my journalistic hat right now. What we need is the courage to enforce it to its full capacity. I think that's it because there might be topics within the DSA like disinformation and I'm Maldita is a fact-checker, I know very well Sergio because of that. But there might be topics like disinformation that might be more nuanced or more difficult to get an enforcement in within the DSA, but illegal content and specifically child abuse content, I think we can all agree that that's not a partisan topic, that we all think that that should be illegal and we should enforce the law against it, right?
Speaker 66
So what I see after having done several of these investigations is that there's a lack of, I don't want to call it willingness, I think it's courage to enforce it to its full capacity.
Nico Schmidt
Yeah, sorry to just open the mic again, but that is exactly what I would be interested in, maybe what you kind of sense, what is the reason that the EU is not using its power to enforce the law that is existing?
Speaker 64
This is opinion making, but I think there's on the one side, there needs to be more resources put into the enforcement teams, and I think that now the DSA enforcement team is around 300, which is quite a lot compared to what we are doing in this room, right? But yet access to data and those kinds of things are not there yet. Secondly, I think for part of the platforms, and that does not necessarily apply to TikTok, there's a geopolitical moment that makes it harder to be courageous. If the thing that you're getting said is if you fine any American platform, the US is going to get out of NATO in the middle of a war with Ukraine, the imbalance is huge.
Speaker 62
Well, I think we have a useful tool, but I think we have we have margin to improve it and to part of this improvement is to improve the enforcement.
Karin Kőváry Sólymos
I think in our case or in a case of political ads, DSA somehow really quickly resolved this problem because the reaction of the platforms was really fast. But I would also address the part that there's a lack of like parts about access to the data because in the case of political ads on Meta or Google's platform, they shut it down, but on the other hand, we cannot really see the data anymore. And it's not just about paid attacks on journalists, but it's also about I don't know other kind of problems with these ads like fraud and so on and so on. So that's why I think it's a really missing part because we really need that data. And as I said in our investigation, it was really just the peak of the iceberg and there is a lot more, I think.
And this is also linked to the other law on political advertising.
Giampaolo.
Pierre Dagard
I feel like I need to address the elephant in the room.
I think this elephant has a name, his name is Donald Trump. And I think he publicly said on multiple occasions, and people in his administration, that they see the DSA as a censorship regulation. So anything they can do to prevent the DSA from being enforced, they will do. And several of the CEOs of these major social media platforms also publicly said that they fully endorsed this vision and this policy program. So I think this is as simple as that, unfortunately.
Raffaella
Maybe Pina has, no? I see you are, you got... Okay. I would like also to stress that what you mentioned in the fight against disinformation, the pedagogical role of making people, I mean, we see that in some countries, the citizens and civil society is much more somehow alert because they are already more formed to kind of media literacy and have more tools to understand.
So I think that what IC is doing in this sense to use these cases also to raise awareness and to help people in a pedagogic way is very important. You also mentioned it before, so media literacy. So thanks to all. I don't see any other raised hand... Ah, Giacomo, yes.
Giacomo Zandonini
Yeah, I would like to ask when it comes to the investigation in Slovakia and the Visegrad countries to Karina, if you could confront the politicians that have paid for this and what was their reaction if there ever was one.
Yes, we did it. Another wave of hate, actually. That was all. That was all. No real, like, no real answers.
Karin Kőváry Sólymos
Also they said that it's against their freedom of speech because they think that they can say that we are liars without evidence and this is freedom of speech. I don't know, very Trumpist. Yeah, Trumpist, yeah.
So, so yeah, that, that was all actually. No real response also from the opposition, that was a kind of surprising because despite the fact that it was like a huge data analysis and, and much of a work, we don't really, I don't want to say that support maybe because we don't really need the support of politicians, but maybe the recognition that something is happening also in Hungary. Okay, Hungary is another, another case, but, but in Slovakia because I think those numbers are kind of brutal in case of Slovakia and the government is the same, so and it's, it's not, it did not end.
Raffaella
Eka. It's good that I know the names of the first row. I feel very close.
Eka Sesitashvili
I just want to make a small comment on this because maybe for you from Western Europe it's not common what's going on in countries close to authoritarianism or full authoritarianism, but this pattern is very, very common everywhere.
In Georgia, we are the target of this kind of insult and every so their propaganda machine working on us and making our cards. For example, in my case, they just made up the quotation I never said about Georgia-Russian war. And every anniversary of the war, there was like Eka Gigauri said this and there was troll bots and they were gathering in front of my house was provoked by this that she said so, which I never said, this was absolutely fake. So it's very common pattern everywhere. It's a Russian pattern, which is in Pico, everyone who are like Putin-aligned guy in the West or Eastern Europe.
It's very, very common. And unfortunately, we see this kind of tendency, very strong tendency in America. So this is the worst part of it. Thank you.
Because this is easier to write a post, a lie, than face critical question. That's our experience.
Raffaella
But what is really worrying is this is amplified by the American platforms, which is... Please.
Speaker 56
Thank you for the chance. Well, another observation from Bulgaria.
I'm surprised that in Slovakia and in your investigation you found traces for paid advertisement by politicians because in Bulgaria we do face the same phenomenon but not with traces for payment, mainly from bots and another layer of smearing campaigns that we have to recognize is something that we may call media wars, info wars. So media that are somehow captured by business or state interests, they are attacking quite often better investigative journalistic media outlets, things like this. So we have it internally on a horizontal base. So it's like a information or media civil war.
We've seen not quite this case but very similar because we also saw the pattern how the disinformation websites and disinfluencers, influencers as some said, amplify this hate from the politicians. So it really, it's a symbiosis I think.
Thanks a lot.
I would just make a short comment on that about Slovakia, that the disinformation websites are often found to be paid by the politicians who spread the hate through their own profiles. So it's really a vicious circle there that works very well for them.
Raffaella
Okay, so not very optimistic scenario, but that's why we are here, to keep shedding light on all this. And I have to say that we need to also applaud our three finalists here. Before passing to the last one, we tried to give a bit more of, I don't see, I don't say positive, but at least recognition to your work.
Raffaella
Ah, okay, if you manage, you really. But no, it's very interesting, David, it's a meta work because it's a podcast regarding investigative journalism. I find very interesting that the jury has decided to kind of give this series of podcast on investigative journalism and about their investigation and also the personal stories and the consequences behind this, a place among the finalists.
I find it also quite relevant because we need to speak about investigative journalism. So tell us about your Protagonista podcast, please.
David Dusa
Yes. So as you have guessed, I'm not a journalist, I'm a director. And I was thinking that maybe we could start with showing the trailer, if that's okay.
David Dusa
Thank you. So, yes, so I'm a I'm a screenwriter, I write fiction usually, I also write documentaries, and together with a producer whose name is Emilie Blézat, a French producer, we started a project called War Room Content, which is co-funded by the European Union. And the idea behind that is to create entertainment that is meaningful and that speaks about the human condition in Europe today. And one of the projects that we have is to put investigative reporters together with writers, fiction writers, and make them tell their stories to another audience. A part of that project is Protagonista.
As unfortunately Pavla is not here today, she is really the heart and soul, she is the investigative reporter in this duo. And the whole project started as a brainstorming session, I can say, where I said that outside the media bubble, people have no idea there is a difference between investigative reporters, journalists, political commentators, pundits, and political influencers. For them it's all media and all media are liars, of course.
So we have to first break through that misunderstanding. And so I think that in a kind of society where emotions are very important, we need to tell an emotional story, which is of course a contradiction in terms since investigative reporters should not involve emotions in their story, but only facts. So yes, so you're screwed more or less in this world. But we can try to do something about that. And this is what Protagonista is trying to do, is to remind society what is investigative reporters are, maybe in a different light than usually.
And that it's really important because they provide the information that is needed for a functioning democracy. And I think that when people, I think most people, most audiences don't even realize what it takes to be an investigative reporter and how much time and effort goes into it. Of course, organized crime and corruption concerns every country. I live in Sweden. Swedish people like to say that there is no corruption in Sweden, which is total bullshit, obviously.
But from Denmark to Serbia, to France, to Ukraine, it concerns every citizen. And this is why it's so important so that we don't go to places where our neighbors to the east have gone.
But to get, you know, investigative reporters who like to work in the shadows, you know, they have a special kind of personality. It's not very easy to make them talk. And this is why Pavla was so important because she had the trust of the journalists. And she knew how to open them up and tell them about their psychological problems, about their drinking problems, about how is it to live under death threat, how is it to live under death threats and so on. And also about talking about their mistakes and how family life can be compatible or not with investigative reporting.
So what we try to do is also to talk to the viewers and ask them, would they be able to be an investigative reporter? Would they be able to take the risk and to do these things? And because independent journalism depends on public support and you've been talking about it, how important it is and how difficult it is to cut through the magma of information. And so this is our, of course, little effort in doing that. I have a good friend, he says, just because it's hopeless doesn't mean it's meaningless.
So I hope this is, I know this is not meaningless, even if it's totally hopeless, obviously. This was the negative part of my speech. Where were we?
Yes, and I think personal stories, you know, to basically personalize the experience of the investigative reporter and make a hero, so to speak, of the investigative reporter is also very important to be able to speak to a younger generation who doesn't understand why you would want to stay anonymous and why you would want to stay in the background where everything is an influencer. And I think that, of course, investigative reporters must stay in the shadows to be able to do their work, but not only. So our work in Protagonista, and we are going to start shooting season two in three weeks in Prague, is to be a complement to your work and hopefully to spread information and to convince people and convince the European Union that funding is important and that you are needed for a functioning democracy. Thank you.
I think your words are the best for the closing, so we shouldn't spoil them too much, but still, if there are any questions to David, I'm very happy to take one before we pass to... Yes, please.
Katharina
Hi, yeah, I'm Katharina. I'm Alice's colleague. I worked also on the Russian Secrets project. Um, yeah, I wanted to ask you because I see like in journalism there's often a journalistic standard. It's about transparency, fact-based, we have to confront everyone.
Like there's a big checklist that has to go into every article, video, etc. And it makes sometimes the story maybe a bit dry. And I want to ask you how do you put this into this fiction media form, yeah, how can you combine it?
David Dusa
Yes, because I spoke with Katharina earlier. So basically Protagonista has two purposes. One purpose is for the audience, another purpose is to invite screenwriters like myself, but you know, other screenwriters in other countries to work with investigative reporters and try to transform the stories into other formats and fiction formats. I think that you have to consider yourself like Zorro. You know, Zorro is two different characters.
You know, it's the same person, but you know, you have to dress for the occasion, right? Sometimes you have to be, you know, fact-checked 100% and dry and, you know, because you don't want to be able to be ridiculed or that your investigation is thrown out as fake news, so to speak, right? But at the same time, you also need to conquer audiences who don't read those things and you need to be able to communicate with them because they're also citizens and they also vote.
And so I think that our my purpose or our purpose in this in this particular context is that, is to propose another life to your stories, another way of telling them. And the reason why we are really want to work with investigative reporters in the writer's room together with them is to make sure of the authenticity of the stories and that we don't transform them into something else in the name of entertainment.
Thank you a lot. Now, David, this is not a question, it's a promise that you have to make to us for the next season. You have a lot of inspiring people here around that you have heard, that you got to know. So we want to see the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize featured high in your next season.
David Dusa
Promise. I mean, I I promise. No, of course. I mean, I'm I want to say that thank you so much for inviting me. Of course, for me it's an incredible experience to be here because I am not a journalist.
But I think it's also I mean, maybe this will sound a bit arrogant, but I think it's also good for you that I'm here so that I can tell you what it looks like from the outside.
Thanks, and we also look forward to meeting Pavla in the future.
Raffaella
Okay, I think that this closing was a bit uplifting and hopefully we will all hear your stories on Protagonista podcast. In the meantime, now we have another important appointment is that the ceremony is in just a few minutes. And having heard you, as I said already, you would all deserve this prize, but as we know, it's only one prize. So we will soon know who is it, but please continue doing this work that is precious to our society and to our democracy. And even if sometimes we have the feeling that it's not recognized, I hope moments like this and like the ceremony tonight will make you feel that you are not alone and we are all not alone in our fight for democracy and for a better society.
So thanks a lot to all of you and please follow my colleagues that will guide you to the press room where the ceremony takes place. And then you are all invited to the cocktail that takes place again up at the third floor, but we will try to guide you. Once again, thanks to Matthew, to Corinna and to Vera and to all the other speakers that are here with us. Thanks a lot.
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