Daniel Pearl Awards

The Daniel Pearl Awards for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting are unique among journalism prizes worldwide in that they were created specifically to honor cross-border investigative reporting. Formerly the ICIJ Awards, the prizes were renamed in 2008 in honor of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was slain by militants in Pakistan in 2002. ICIJ conducted the awards from 1998 to 2013.

Pearl Awards Past Winners

2013

International: Joachim Dyfvermark, Sven Bergman and Fredrik Laurin, Uppdrag granskning: The Black Boxes and Teliasonera: The Uzbek Affair. Two reports on the Swedish public television program “Mission Investigate” revealed how the Swedish telecom giant Teliasonera cooperated with dictatorships in Central Asia in tracking dissidents and human rights activists, and paid extensive bribes to gain access to the market in Uzbekistan.

U.S.: Geeta Anand, Betsy McKay and Gautam Naik, Wall Street Journal: TB: A Menace Returns. Reporters followed the lethal spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis across India and beyond, exacerbated by a World Health Organization policy that encouraged countries to prioritize regular TB at the expense of drug-resistant strains.

2011

International: Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: Offshore Crime, Inc. This investigation uncovered how Eastern European criminals and corrupt politicians use offshore havens as fronts for money laundering, tax evasion, and drug and weapon smuggling.

U.S.: Mimi Chakarova, Center for Investigative Reporting: The Price of Sex. Photojournalist Chakarova reveals in riveting detail the underground criminal networks and the experiences of Eastern European women forced into prostitution abroad.

Special citation: NPR, Radio Canada/CBC, and Swiss TV RSI for Tamiflu, Inc. The investigation examined the decisions made by the World Health Organization and The Centers for Disease Control in light of the swine flu and H1N1 flu pandemic.

2010

Kjersti Knudsson and Synnove Bakke, Norwegian Broadcasting Corp.; David Leigh, The Guardian; Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean, BBC Newsnight; Jeroen Trommelen, de Volkskrant (Western Europe), for “Trafigura’s Toxic Waste Dump,” which exposed how a powerful offshore oil trader tried to cover up the poisoning of 30,000 West Africans.

Aram Roston, The Nation (United States), for How the US Funds the Taliban on how Pentagon military contractors in Afghanistan routinely pay millions of dollars in protection money to the Taliban to move supplies to U.S. troops.

Special Certificate of Recognition: T. Christian Miller, ProPublica; Doug Smith and Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times; and Pratap Chatterjee, freelance (United States), for “Disposable Army,” on how injured civilian contractors working for the U.S. military have been abandoned by Washington.

2008

Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker, New York Times series A Toxic Pipeline exposed a worldwide pipeline of Chinese consumer products containing toxic, sometimes deadly, chemical additives.

Joachim Dyfvermark and Fredrik Laurin, TV4 Sweden, “The Illegal Cod,” revealed how Russian trawlers, aided by Western food companies, have systematically overfished their quotas of cod in the Barents Sea, home to the world’s last population of healthy cod.

Special citation: Loretta Tofani (freelance), Salt Lake Tribune series American Imports, Chinese Deaths. Through dozens of interviews made in five trips to China and analysis of thousands of medical, shipping, and customs records, Tofani thoroughly documented an epidemic of fatal occupational diseases among Chinese workers who manufacture cheap U.S. imports.

2005

Brian Ross, David Wilson Scott, and Rhonda Schwarts, ABC News 20/20, Peace at What Price: Investigating UN Misconduct in the Congo documented systematic sexual exploitation of girls and boys by UN peacekeepers and civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Special Citation: TV4 Sweden for the hour-long documentary The Broken Promise, which exposed U.S. government involvement in the “extraordinary rendition” of two Egyptian citizens from Sweden to Egypt.

2004

Winner: Russell Carollo and Mei-Ling Hopgood, Dayton Daily News, United States – Casualties of Peace

Investigation reveals, often in vivid detail, the widespread violence directed at Peace Corps volunteers, who since 1962 have died at a rate of about one every two months.

2003

Winner: Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, United States, “In the Party of God,” Jeffrey Goldberg uses vivid detail and impressionistic images to give readers a view into the world of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite terrorist organization that has claimed more American victims than any other terrorist group.

2002

Winner: Thomas Maier, Newsday, United States, Death on the Job: Immigrants at Risk”. Maier exposed the extent of health and safety abuses suffered by immigrants in American workplaces and documented the immigrants’ often fatal quest for a better life.

2001

Winner: Jacques Pauw, SABC, South Africa, “The Bishop of Shyogwe” tells the story of Samuel Musabyimana, an Anglican bishop wanted by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

2000

Winner: Sang-Hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza, Associated Press, United States, Bridge at No Gun Ri about the No Gun Ri incident, in which dozens or hundreds of Korean civilians died at the hands of US ground troops.

1999

Winner: Steve Bradshaw and Mike Robinson, BBC News Panorama, United Kingdom, When Good Men Do Nothing. Investigates what led to the international community’s non-intervention in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, despite indicators of the coming carnage made available to policy-makers in the United Nations and the United States.