Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize 2026: Award Ceremony
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Offset
Transcript offset
Export
Live capture
Versions of this video
Transcripts may differ slightly from one version to another.
PRESSER European Parliament
Roberta Metsola
I don't think any of us in Malta or in this Parliament were ever quite the same after that black Monday in October of 2017. It was a seismic shift. The moment we realized that a journalist, a woman, a mother, could be assassinated in plain sight for exposing the corrupt. Or that it had happened in our Europe, on our streets. For nine years, her sons and her family have carried on without her.
And the past months in court brought it all flooding back. And once again, we were left without the justice we are owed. The justice we needed, the justice Europe rightly demanded. The justice that Daphne's formidable mother died without seeing. Let me say tonight what this house has said across political groups every year since: we're not going anywhere.
Promises of a full investigation have to be more than words. The public inquiry report must be implemented. We will be keep going until anyone and everyone who planted the bomb, the mastermind who ordered it, or those who spent years trying to cover it up are all held to account. It's not too much to ask and it cannot be too much to deliver. Those who wanted Daphne silenced failed.
Her stories traveled further than ever. And in Valletta, our capital city, people still come back with candles and with flowers, with portraits, with hope.
Those of us who knew Daphne remember more than the investigative journalist. We miss her humor as much as her courage, her criticism, sometimes biting, that made us want to be better politicians. Her pen that made us want to be better writers. Her recipes that made us all want to be better cooks. Her logic that made the complicated obvious.
Roberta Metsola
She should be here tonight. And four months after Daphne, it happened again. Journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were shot in their home shortly before they were due to be married. Jozef and Jana, Ján's parents, have carried a grief no parent should ever have to carry as they speak up for journalists they have never met. This month also marks 20 years since Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in Moscow for telling the truth about the war in Chechnya.
Our press room in Brussels carries her name so that every journalist and every one of us in this house remembers what she gave. Daphne, Ján, and Anna refused to look away. And we can see that same refusal in the work of this year's finalists.
Roberta Metsola
Congratulations to all of you. This Parliament will keep standing with you. Now that the anti-SLAPP rules we fought for are in force, we will be following very closely how each member state puts them into practice. Thank you goes to the jury. Thank you goes to my colleague, Member of the European Parliament David Casa, who brought this prize to life and who never stopped fighting.
And to Pina Picierno for all that she does, for her passion and personal commitment to the issues that matter to all of us. We've been working together on this for almost five years now, Pina, we will not stop. This prize matters to the European Parliament and it matters to Europe. All the finalists deserve recognition, all of you who know that the front page has become the front line.
Roberta Metsola
We are grateful and we are with you. Thank you for carrying these names with such dignity. For Daphne, for Jan and Martina, for Anna, and for all the others, we will keep going. Thank you.
Speaker 4
Madam President, Madam Vice-President, members of the European Parliament, dear members of the Caruana Galizia family, Matthew and Corinne, dear Vera, dear finalists, ladies and gentlemen. Illum flimkien insellmu l-memorja u x-xogħol ta' Daphne. That means, I'm told, today together we honor Daphne's memory and work. Let us be honest, many of us would not be honoring her work if what had happened nine years and five days ago had not happened. But it did happen.
Speaker 3
And what happened was murder. Daphne published her last post on Running Commentary at 14:35. Then she left the house and drove off.
The explosion came just minutes later. Sadly, what happened will happen again if there is no justice. And as President Metsola said, it did happen again just four months and five days later in Slovakia with Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová. When Daphne was murdered, she faced more than 40 libel cases. Is it 46, 47, or 48?
Okay, 48. Her family still carries the burden of the last one, if I'm correct. These are not details nine years later, but continued, and if I may say so, intergenerational punishment for Daphne speaking uncomfortable truths. Seven years before she was murdered, in April 2010, Daphne wrote an article entitled "Getting Away with Murder". The then Home Affairs Minister had told the Maltese Parliament that there had been 43 unresolved murders from 1972 to 2010.
I don't know how many it is today in Malta. Daphne then wrote: "You'd think that in a town of around 400,000 people, it would be impossible to get away with murder, but clearly not, unless some of them" — and this is her humor — "unless some of them have popped their clogs since they did the deed." And now to this year's excellent finalists. Once again, their works are often that of teams, at times working across borders. On investigative journalism itself, we have Protagonista podcast with Pavla Holcová's in-depth talks with some of Europe's leading reporters.
What stood out for me in the podcast series was the shocking interview with fearless Stevan Dojčinović. He details Serbian crime torture chambers, how victims' bodies were cut up and fed to the fish in the Danube.
This is just a few years ago. Platená nenávisť, or Hired Hatred, Hatred for Hire, details the mechanics of online hate campaigns against journalists. It was produced by the Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak together with Frontstory in Poland, Investigace in the Czech Republic, and VSquare in Hungary. Efe Verifica is a finalist for Noticias Falsas, Víctimas Reales, or False News, Real Victims. Others scrutinized the European institutions.
Vox Europe and partners for War Made Sustainable, on how green investment funds bankroll the arms industry with EU backing. Solomon and partners are here for taking us inside Europol's shadow IT system in a piece entitled "They Protect the Law While Breaking It".
Investigate Europe and many others together show how Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide the environmental costs of data centers. And finally, De Correspondent for "Migranten Opsluiten" or "Locking Up Migrants" is about the detention center in Albania. "Italy does it, the Netherlands wants to" was the subtitle. To every finalist, thank you. Your work like Daphne's makes someone uncomfortable.
Speaker 4
That is how it matters. Okay. It is my great honor to announce the winner of the 2026 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism.
Speaker 3
Like last year, this year's winner is also the work of a team writing together, working on all aspects from the graphics, photographs, and the fact-checking to the audio, research, and obviously the writing and the research, sorry, the research. So I would like to invite to the stage the teams who worked on the winning entry, that is from De Correspondent. The winners are Maite Vermeulen, Giacomo Zandonini, and the team at De Correspondent. The prize is for all of you for your courage and your unwavering, unwavering commitment to the truth. Thank you and congratulations.
Speaker 5
You didn't take my speech. No, no, no. Thank you, thank you so much. This is really, really a dream come true for us, to be standing here among so many esteemed colleagues that we just heard from in the seminar, and to receive this prize in honor of one of the bravest investigative journalists to ever live. To have our investigation awarded a prize in her name, Daphne Caruana Galizia, is truly the honor of a lifetime.
For years, European Union and a lot of European member states have been spending billions of euros to prevent migrants from reaching our shores. Both Giacomo and I have been reporting on European-funded migration deterrence for well over a decade. We're getting old. But when we started reporting this story on the Italy-Albania deal, we really had no idea what was in store for us.
Because never before had we encountered a European migration operation that was this heavily guarded. Not only was it literally hidden from view behind enormous walls, but it was also hidden in the financial books, hidden in non-disclosure agreements, hidden in judicial fictions that were so complicated that they were really hard to pin down. The very nature of this operation was to make independent scrutiny as difficult as possible. The fact that this hidden deal is being seen by many European politicians as a blueprint for future European migration policy is perhaps not surprising, but definitely alarming. We truly hope that this prize will shed extra attention on our investigation, because it is and it should serve as a warning for anyone in the EU who holds human rights and the rule of law dear, and particularly to our representatives in this institution that we're here today.
Offshoring migrants to faraway places is not a solution to our problems. It's a scaremongering tactic that undercuts the very foundation, the principles and values of this European project. Well, journalism is always a team effort, of course, and our project certainly was. Giacomo and I headed the project as investigative reporters, but it would never have been possible to win this prize without the amazing work of our information designer, Sharon, who is over there.
Give her a round of applause. And our image editor, Bebe, who's over here. And many of our other colleagues at De Correspondent who couldn't be here today, including our photographer Francesco, our graphic designer Federico, our chief image editor Isabelle, our copy editor Noor, our developer Roderick, our fact-checker Reffi, and our editors-in-chief Lisa and Rosanne. The platform that we work for, De Correspondent, is an independent journalism platform in the Netherlands that is free of advertising and fully funded by about 60,000 members. And this member model gives space to investigations like these that take up years of our lives and plenty of resources.
So we're really happy to use the prize money to fund more of these important and independent investigations and to continue our work on migration deals in the future, which feels more relevant than ever. Thank you so much.
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the European Parliament for the 2026 Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism. This prize was established in 2019 as a tribute to Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist and blogger who was assassinated in 2017. The prize rewards on a yearly basis outstanding journalism that promotes or defends the core principles and values of the European Union, such as human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights.
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the European Parliament. Welcome to the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism. It is a pleasure to see so many of you here today. This prize was established in 2020 as a tribute to Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist and blogger who was assassinated in 2017.
The prize is awarded every year on the anniversary of her death to reward outstanding journalism that promotes or defends the core principles and values of the European Union, such as human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights.
Ask anything about this video — I analyse its transcript to answer.