GIJC25 Program Launches — Two Nobel Laureates and African War Crimes Expert Are Featured Speakers

Two Nobel laureates and an African legal expert on international rule of law are the latest iconic speakers to be announced for the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from November 20-24. They will share urgent insights with the world’s watchdog community as they join more than 300 other notable global speakers and experts from nearly 100 countries, participating in the 150-plus panels that are part of the conference’s official program.

The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Maria Ressa, will be the opening keynote speaker at the conference, which is co-hosted by the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and GIJN member Malaysiakini. The co-founder of Rappler, the pioneering investigative outlet in the Philippines, Ressa will share a major address on the challenges and future of the global investigative journalism community — and of truth itself — followed by an all-Asian keynote panel.

The conference will also feature a second Nobel winner — economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz — who offers unique expertise on several urgent topics for investigative journalists, such as income inequality, climate change impacts, corporate governance, and globalization. A former chief economist at the World Bank and a current co-chair of the High-Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress at the OECD, Stiglitz will host a special session aimed at helping attendees understand financial misconduct and what abuses to look for.

In addition, Nigerian lawyer Charles Adeogun-Phillips will share his expertise on international rule of law, in a special session that will offer deep insights into laws tied to human rights, war crimes, and business crimes. His career spans war crimes prosecutions and white-collar crime investigations. Adeogun-Phillips worked for more than a decade as a lead prosecutor for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UNICTR) and brings a wealth of international criminal law experience.

Over 100 panels and workshops in the conference’s agenda are now available on the GIJC25 website. We will be adding more sessions and speakers in the coming weeks. Additional speakers just released this week include Hayatte Abdou (Comoros), Lina Attalah (Egypt), Sheila Coronel, (Philippines), Yasuomi Sawa (Japan), Frederik Obermaier (Germany), Stéphane Horel (France), Luis Assardo (Guatemala), and Leon Yin (United States). Beyond the many networking and meet-up opportunities, there are numerous panels on evergreen subjects like data mining and analysis, following illicit money flows, cross-border collaboration, and environmental exploitation, as well as new insights on sustainable funding models, spotting AI deepfakes, documenting war crimes from afar, and investigating under a democracy in decline. The conference will also include a series of documentary film screenings. And in an era where journalism faces an increasing number of physical, legal, and surveillance threats, GIJC25 will offer practical sessions on protecting sources and whistleblowers, new tools for operating a secure newsroom, as well as drop-in clinics for advice on dealing with defamation and libel threats.

Rappler co-founder Maria Ressa speaking at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Hamburg in 2019. Image: Courtesy of Nick Jaussi, nickjaussi.com

Keynote speaker Ressa is an influential voice in exposing disinformation and defending democracy worldwide. In a rousing speech at the 2019 Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Hamburg, Ressa implored the gathered audience to stand up for the truth: “We have to join forces to protect the facts.” In that address, she noted that her relentless persecution by the Duterte government and its supporters included recent arrests in just a five-week period, forcing her to post bail eight times in three months, and sometimes personally receiving 90 personal hate messages per hour. “This is an existential moment in time — where, if we don’t take the right steps forward, democracy as we know it is dead. The more I study this time — which started with technology’s disruption, then attacks against journalists, then democracy — the more I’m convinced that the attacks against us and our values are so insidious that the equivalent of an atomic explosion has ruptured our worlds, and all we do is chip away at the tip of the iceberg we can see.”

The fallout from that explosion in the intervening years has been an ominous increase in autocratic governance; the rise of even more wealthy and powerful oligarchs; the abandonment of fact checking at social media platforms; wars of naked aggression; and the explicit targeting of journalists, even by democratic governments. But this same period also saw Ressa and Russian editor Dmitry Muratov awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace,” and the publication of Ressa’s call-to-arms book: “How to Stand Up to a Dictator.” So don’t miss Maria Ressa’s keynote address on November 21.

Register for GIJC25 here.