Organized Crime and Coruption Project

The OCCRP was named one of seven finalists by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) for the 2010 Daniel Pearl Awards for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. Reporters from OCCRP spent months reporting and writing a series of stories on the illegal document trade in Eastern Europe.

“We are especially proud that our member journalists have been named as finalists for this award from this organization. ICIJ is a model for all of us in doing international cross border work to the highest standards and Daniel Pearl was a courageous journalist who made the ultimate sacrifice,” said Drew Sullivan, Executive Director of OCCRP.

The biennial award attracted entries from 40 countries.

“Despite financial woes, cuts in investigative teams, and secrecy-obsessed governments, the Pearl awards show that in-depth, watchdog journalism is here to stay,” said ICIJ Director David E. Kaplan.

“We are honoring a movement that is spreading to every corner of the globe,” added Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity. “The reach of investigative journalism today is unprecedented.”

The award honors cross border investigative reporting. The finalists were selected by a panel of five international judges. One American and one international entry will be announced as winners at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Switzerland on April 24.

• Hugo Alconada Mon, La Nación (Argentina), for his revealing series “The Suitcase Scandal,” on the secret funding by Venezuela’s Chavez government of the presidential campaign of Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

• Per Hermanrud, TV4 Sweden (Sweden), for his disturbing documentary “Down at any Cost,” an undercover look at how much of the world’s down feathers are painfully plucked from living birds and sold to unsuspecting consumers.

• Syed Nazakat Hussain, The Week magazine (India), for his powerful series “India’s Secret Torture Chambers” and “Top Secret,” on India’s secret chain of Guantanamo-like prisons and rendition program for kidnapping terrorism suspects.

• 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 their gutsy series “Trafigura’s Toxic Waste Dump,” which exposed how a powerful offshore oil trader poisoned 30,000 West Africans.

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

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

• Roman Shleynov, Stanimir Vaglenov, Aleksandar Bozinovski, Dumitru Lazur, Vlad Lavrov, and Stevan Dojcinovic of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (Eastern Europe) for their revealing series “Document Dilemma,” a six-country investigation into the black market for visas and passports

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a collaboration of some of the world’s best investigative journalists, is a project of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C.