Dataharvest 2025 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

*The keynote will take place in the Aula Z 1/13 (Auditorium Hanswijk, 1st floor) and will be streamed to Aula Donche (on the first floor).

As a cross-border community of investigative journalists interested in collaboration, how can we contribute to documenting and telling the story of conflicts with our work? With the wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, journalists are both victims and witnesses of these conflicts. Israel’s war on Gaza has become the deadliest conflict ever for journalists, and journalists have been threatened, killed, and tortured while documenting Russia’s war on Ukraine.

This year, the Dataharvest keynote conversation is with Laurent Richard, founder and executive director of Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to support and/or continue the work of journalists who are killed, injured, threatened, or whose work is restricted in another way. Laurent will present and discuss Forbidden’s Stories’ work on the Gaza and Viktoriia projects.

Laurent will be joined in conversation by Ulla Sätereie, chairperson of the Swedish Association of Investigative Journalism. They'll discuss how the investigative journalism community can engage with the coverage of these wars, how to coordinate collaborative investigations from afar, and how to do so while keeping journalists safe. They will talk about the peculiarities of both projects and the reception they've had in France and beyond. After their conversation, there will be time for questions and discussion

The session will highlight methods to uncover the activities of consulting, PR and advertising firms, taking attendees through the steps that DeSmog and ARIA took to build an evidence base for their investigations into these sectors, how they landed this work in mainstream media, and the impact of that work so far.

The panel will also walk the audience through the methods, tools, and partners they used, and show them how they might replicate that work in other jurisdictions. They will also briefly touch on the different ways that DeSmog and ARIA operate in the media ecosystem.

The PR, advertising, and consulting sectors have long been fundamental enablers of corporate activity, often overlooked because their work is carried out behind closed doors, and protected by NDAs. It is therefore important that journalists have the necessary tools to investigate their activity and hold these firms accountable for their actions.

Attendees need no previous knowledge or expertise, except for a curiosity in the workings of the PR and consulting sectors.

When attendees leave this session, attendees they should have a better understanding of the tools available to them to identify the activities and clients of the PR and consulting sectors in their own countries, putting them on a strong foundation for future investigations into this space.

The choices made by consumers, corporations, and financiers in the Global North ripple across borders, often shaping the lives and environments of communities in the Global South. From sourcing raw materials to funding large-scale projects, some decisions result in exploitative practices, environmental degradation, and corruption in vulnerable regions. Journalism can play a critical role in unveiling these hidden connections by tracing supply chains and financial flows. The data and research team from the Pulitzer Center will share the techniques, data and tools they used to help journalists uncover the supply chains and financial enablers behind commodities and projects that contributed to environmental degradation and human rights abuse in the Global South. This session will dive into the reporting methodologies behind environmental investigations on rainforest and ocean issues that the team has conducted. The team will provide participants with an investigative framework and introduce them to both the open and private databases and tools used for such investigation. The purpose of this session is to allow participants to replicate the methodologies for their own investigations and to have practical guidelines to kickstart such investigations.

Customs records and open-source databases are a goldmine, but they can also be overwhelming. With so much data, where do you begin looking for stories? How can you be sure that what you're seeing is what you think it is? And how should you organise your findings once you have a good lead?

At a time when international sanctions affect everything from oil to aircraft parts, this presentation offers insights into investigating sanctioned goods, sharing information on the databases and tools and techniques useful for finding original supply chain stories. We will be drawing on our experience of tracking shipments of aircraft parts from western facilities to Russia via India (see: https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/boeing-airbus-russia-sanctions-aircraft-parts-india-intermediaries). We will explain how we trawled through thousands of transactions to find what we were looking for – and how we turned rows of data into actual stories.

Russian gangsters, fake counts, golden Ferraris and shell companies in Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Investigating the JuicyFields case meant plunging into a wild maze of deception, false leads and spectacular turns. Hundreds of thousands of people were deceived by a group of serial scammers. They claimed everybody could become rich by investing in virtual cannabis. With losses amounting to more than half a billion dollars, the JuicyFields scam is one of the largest pyramid schemes ever investigated by European authorities. Gabriela Keller (Correctiv) and Elisa Simantke (Paper Trail Media) were part of an international team of journalists that uncovered how a bunch of criminals from Russia went on digital raids targeting Europeans again and again. In this panel, Gabriela and Eilsa will explain how they built up sources, what they learnt from OSINT and police documents, how they tracked the path of the criminals from St.Petersburg to Berlin, Switzerland and South America. They will also talk about how they analysed company structures – and learned how to avoid the traps set for them by the criminals. Because, as the investigation built up momentum, the fraudsters were trying to lure the reporters into their network of illusions. And while the JuicyFields website is now defunct, the masterminds behind it are setting up new scams. The business of the fraudsters continues in several countries – as is the international investigation. That means reporters can still learn how to carry on investigating in their own country.

Prompted by nearly 2 TB of leaked data, a recent collaborative investigation co-run by OCCRP and SVT shed unprecedented light on the inner workings and processes of two major scam call centre networks that conned victims out of at least US$275 million over four years. This session will cover how we approached this leak, which included millions of multilingual audio and video media, among other data formats, and how we made it possible for journalists to search that data like any trove of documents.

Journalists should walk away with a better understanding of the challenges and breakthroughs of modern leaks and the methodologies and tools media organizations can employ today in investigations.

In this session we will talk about how to make the most of victims' testimonies, court filings and other data to document the scale of state-sponsored threats, identify patterns of abuse across several countries and expose flaws in law enforcement systems and intergovernmental institutions.

How can you benefit from the knowledge and methodologies of experts to help you in your investigation? Are there any ‘recipes’ for creating a safe space of knowledge with scientists? Are there dos and don'ts? How do you navigate the different relationships to time? Come and listen as journalists from the Forever Pollution Project share their experience of brainstorming with 5 to 18 experts, including environmental chemists, toxicologists, social scientists and lawyers (and survived).

For the past decade, EU countries have been falling over themselves to prosecute suspected Syrian war criminals hiding in Europe, relying on ‘Universal Jurisdiction’ laws. Among the most prevalent are Germany, France and Spain.

Globally, there are dozens of organisations that claim to hunt down former regime agents, ISIS fighters, and military officials accused of committing serious war crimes before slipping into Europe. These organisations raise millions in government funding and garner significant praise from the world's media.

Behind the scenes, however, we find a nontransparent, shadowy alliance between police, prosecutors, and intelligence, with some NGOs blurring the lines between activism and policing. The result is an enthusiastic but deeply flawed application of universal jurisdiction, with a growing trail of ill-fated prosecutions built on flimsy evidence and unreliable witnesses. These have been collected by inexperienced investigators with questionable procedures — and much of this activity is hidden from public view.

There are currently around 120 universal jurisdiction cases across Europe. The fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024 will only increase the need to understand the intricacies of war crimes cases and how to report on prosecutions in Europe.

This session proposes to provide journalists with the tools and prompts to examine cases in their own countries critically. We will tell the journalists exactly how to do this, how to find information and sources, and how to avoid traps, not be drawn in by PR, but to see and assess evidence for what it is.

Europe's pharmaceutical industry is notoriously opaque – and powerful. Big Pharma doesn't want us to know how they determine the prices of the medicines they market, where they keep their profits or to whom they hand out millions in funding. The Investigate Europe's investigation Deadly Prices revealed that millions of Europeans lack access to medicines that save or prolong lives in other European countries, and in six EU countries one in four of 32 important medicines analysed is not available, often priced out of reach. This presentation will share tips and techniques on how to investigate Big Pharma – and will be transparent about what still remains hidden. From data that can reveal the true costs of critical medicines to public disclosure data that shows where the industry's millions go, we will help you with ideas and case studies on how to scrutinise Europe's secretive pharmaceutical world.

The Church is one of the most important players in the European property market, yet it remains an opaque institution, hard to investigate. Our collaborative project Sacred Grounds is the first to bring a comprehensive picture of valuable assets the Church owns across European cities and of its investment strategies shaping our cities.

For six months, we cooperated across European media outlets to find out whether Churches manage their land holdings in the spirit of Christianity, in the service of the common good, and in accordance with their own ethical codes. And what is the impact of church property dealings on the affordability of housing and public services? The coordinators of the Urban Journalism Network investigation will showcase major international and local findings, explain how to get data and how to investigate the non-transparent institution that the Church is.