The European Parliament launched the Daphne Caruana Galizia Prize on Friday 16 October, named after the Maltese investigative journalist who was murdered in a car bomb attack on 16 October 2017 while investigating cases of government corruption and money laundering.
This award will honour important journalistic work. “Some of it can be investigative, but it does not have to be”, stressed Heidi Hautala (Greens/EFA, Finland), Parliament Vice-President responsible for Human Rights and Democracy. “And we did not want to limit the award to EU citizens or EU based organisations”, she added.
The award ceremony will take place every year in mid-October. The call for applications for the first edition will be launched around 3 May 2021, the Parliament announced, which will subsequently select an independent organisation to establish the detailed criteria for the prize.
Although the prize is initiated and supported by Parliament, it will be managed by an independent media partner based in the EU, in order to protect the independence of the prize and the work of the media. “It’s not us, politicians, who will choose!”, said Mrs Hautala.
She hopes that the prize will highlight current threats to press freedom “even in the European Union Member States”.
Andrew Caruana Galizia, the Maltese journalist’s son, who was invited to take part in the launch of the prize on Friday, also stressed this point at length.
Welcoming this initiative, he recalled that “it’s not only a duty of governments not to harass and murder journalists, it’s also their duty to create the right environment for press freedom to actively protect journalist”. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)