In a scandal known as ‘Vacunagate,’ 487 influential people in Peru, including its president, were secretly inoculated against COVID-19 months before vaccines were approved for the public. Two investigative newsrooms in Peru found that Chinese drug makers had secretly sent thousands of ‘courtesy’ vaccine doses to several countries in South America in addition to the doses needed for clinical trials there. Editors from both told GIJN how reporters can tackle this new form of corruption.
GIJN is pleased to partner with Finance Uncovered, a UK-based investigative journalism training and reporting project, to organize two webinars for African journalists on how to investigate company finances.
Millions of people disappear every year, according to the International Commission on Missing People, and organized crime is involved in many of these cases. The violence associated with drug trafficking in particular, but also wildlife smuggling, resource theft, human trafficking, and other criminal rackets, plays a key role in many of the disappearances.
In this behind-the-scenes look at an important investigation into sexual abuse by international aid workers, The New Humanitarian investigations editor Paisley Dodds recounts how reporters collected the heartrending stories of abuse from the front lines of the Ebola response.
GIJN has rounded up seven of the talks in the TED back-catalogue that are most interesting and relevant for investigative journalists. Available for free online, and in multiple languages, this selection spreads the word about tools, stories, and interesting investigations to audiences around the world.
The pandemic has seen film festivals around the world go virtual, including Transparency International’s Films For Transparency. Here are five of our favorites from the anti-corruption documentaries that made it onto their shortlist.
In the project Migrantes de otro mundo — Migrants from Another World — a team of more than 40 journalists in more than a dozen countries decided to collaborate to tell the untold story of the migrants from Asia and Africa who travel through Latin America each year. As the creators of the project put it: “By its wandering nature, migration is a story that can only be properly told through collaboration.”
As countries rapidly spend billions of dollars to fight the coronavirus pandemic, digging into government contracts is taking on a new urgency.
The crisis poses new challenges. Officials are using emergency purchasing procedures, creating barriers to public disclosure, and slowing down their handling of requests under freedom of information laws.
Supply chains connect wildlife suppliers to end users. However, there is too much focus on poaching and not enough on trafficking, according to Andrea Crosta, executive director of Earth League International, an NGO that investigates wildlife crime and runs WildLeaks.
In this excerpt from his new book on protecting democracy, Larry Diamond, founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, outlines 10 steps to combat kleptocracy around the world. Among them is the need to end the use of anonymous shell companies and “increase international support for investigative journalism.”
