Three investigations. Three powerful reminders of why cross-border journalism matters.
Journalists behind hard-hitting investigations into soaring European medicine prices, Israeli attacks on Palestinian reporters, and EU complicity in migrant expulsions in North Africa have won the 2025 IJ4EU Impact Awards.
Sharing equal honours, each of the three winning teams received €5,000 in prize money at the annual awards of the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund, which supports cross-border watchdog reporting.
In alphabetical order, the winning investigations were:
- Deadly Prices, by Investigate Europe and partners NDR, WDR, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reporters United, RTP and Eesti Ekspress, which calculated the cost of critical drugs across nine EU countries, highlighting how pharmaceutical companies exploit opaque pricing and intellectual property rules.
- The Gaza Project, a consortium of 50 reporters from 13 newsrooms led by Forbidden Stories, which documented patterns of attacks on journalists in Gaza and the West Bank.
- Desert Dumps by Lighthouse Reports, Enass, Inkyfada, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, IrpiMedia and Tagesschau, which detailed how EU funds, vehicles and intelligence underpin mass expulsions of migrants into desert areas.
The jury also gave an honourable mention to How an EU-funded security force helped Senegal crush democracy protests, by reporters working with Al Jazeera English and Fundación porCausa.
“Impact is not always a court ruling, policy change or political event,” Paul Caruana Galizia, a member of the independent jury that awarded the prizes, said, speaking of the Gaza Project.
“Sometimes it is clarity: meticulous reconstruction that forces a public reckoning and restores the human detail that blackout conditions try to erase. That is impact, and it is ongoing.”
Excellence in collaborative reporting
The prizes were presented on 26 September in Athens during the IJ4EU UNCOVERED Conference, hosted by the iMEdD International Journalism Forum.
The IJ4EU Impact Awards, now in their fifth year, honour excellence in collaborative reporting on public-interest stories that cross borders. The awards are open to all eligible teams, regardless of whether they have received IJ4EU funding. None of this year’s winning investigations were supported by IJ4EU grants.
The 2025 awards drew 36 nominations from 58 countries, with every EU member state represented. The jury selected the winners from a shortlist compiled by evaluators at Leipzig University.
This year’s jury was chaired by Gill Phillips, director of editorial legal services at The Guardian. Other members were Paul Caruana Galizia, an award-winning investigative journalist at the Financial Times; Mira Milosevic, executive director of the Global Forum for Media Development; Maribel Königer, director of journalism and media at ERSTE Foundation; and Kolja Weber, founder of FlokiNET.The IJ4EU Impact Award is managed by the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom in partnership with the other implementing partners of the IJ4EU fund: the International Press Institute, the European Journalism Centre and Arena for Journalism in Europe. IJ4EU is co-funded by the European Commission and philanthropic donors including Adessium Foundation and Fritt Ord Foundation.
