ICIJ announces Daniel Pearl Awards finalists

The award was created to honour cross-border investigative reporting. It is presented by the ICIJ, a project of the Centre for Public Integrity in Washington, DC.

“Despite financial woes, cuts in investigative teams, and secrecy-obsessed governments, the Pearl awards show that in-depth, watchdog journalism is here to stay,” says ICIJ director David E. Kaplan. “We are honouring a movement that is spreading to every corner of the globe,” adds Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Centre for Public Integrity. “The reach of investigative journalism today is unprecedented.”

A panel of five international judges selected the seven finalists. Of those seven finalists, two entries - one American, one international - will be announced as winners on 24 April 2010 at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

The finalists are:

• Hugo Alconada Mon, La Nación (Argentina), for his 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 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 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 series “Disposable Army,” on how injured civilian contractors working for the US 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 US troops.

• Roman Shleynov, Stanimir Vaglenov, Aleksandar Bozinovski, Dumitru Lazur, Vlad Lavrov, and Stevan Dojcinovic of the Organised 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.

Formerly the ICIJ Award, the Pearl prize was renamed in 2008 after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was slain by Pakistani militants in 2002. Selections this year were made by an international panel of judges:

• Sheila Coronel, director, Stabile Centre for Investigative Journalism, Columbia University; former executive director, Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism.

• David E. Kaplan, director, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists; former chief investigative correspondent, US News & World Report.

• Ron Nixon, reporter, The New York Times, Washington bureau; former training director for the US-based Investigative Reporters and Editors.

• Gerardo Reyes, Miami-based correspondent and columnist, El Nuevo Herald. Reyes covers his native Colombia and other Latin American countries.

• Margo Smit, director, Dutch-Flemish Association of Investigative Journalists (VVOJ), University of Groningen journalism teacher, and TV news producer.