This year’s Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize for Journalism goes to the Lost in Europe collective, a cross-border project including VRT journalists that carries out research on unaccompanied minors who disappear once they arrive in Europe.
Culture
Investigative journalist collective Lost in Europe wins Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize
Sally Tipper
Published:
Fourteen media outlets from across Europe are part of the collective, including VRT NWS, De Standaard and Knack in Belgium. Other partners come from Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. They found that more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors disappeared between 2021 and 2023, and it is suspected that the true figure is even higher.
“Of the 27 EU countries we asked for data, plus Moldova, Norway, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, only 20 responded and only 13 countries provided data,” said Dutch investigative journalist Geesje van Haren, who accepted the award on behalf of the collective. “Large countries like France and Spain have not even responded correctly.”
The prize, which is supported by the European Parliament, was awarded for the first time in 2021 in honour of Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed by a car bomb in 2017. A jury of press and civil society representatives from across the EU award the prize, worth €20,000, each year around the anniversary of her murder.