You can register for the presentation of the Vrede van Nijmegen Penning, on 18 April at 16:00 in the Stevenskerk in Nijmegen, via the organisation's website.
The Bellingcat international network of journalists and citizen journalists has been innovatively using public data and images to uncover the truth about crimes, human rights violations, and abuses in conflicts and wars since 2014. Founder and citizen journalist Eliot Ward Higgins (born in 1979) previously wrote as a blogger and citizen investigative journalist under the pseudonym of Brown Moses. He mainly uses open data and social media channels for his investigations into abuses. In 2015, he received the Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award, a German award for excellence in journalism.
For example, Higgins and Bellingcat investigated the wars in Syria and the Russo-Ukrainian war, the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. Higgins first got widespread media attention for identifying weapons in videos of the Syrian conflict. Bellingcat worked with Transparency International to expose the misuse of Scottish Limited Partnerships for criminal money laundering schemes in the UK. Bellingcat also published a high-profile investigation into the murder of Óscar Pérez in Venezuela, together with Forensic Architecture.
Bellingcat shares this methodology with an ever-growing network of citizen journalists. Major institutions, such as the International Criminal Court and the UN's International Independent and Impartial Mechanism on Syria, have also expressed interest in using open data for evidence. In 2018, the documentary 'Bellingcat - Truth in a Post-Truth World' was released, which zooms in on the work of Higgins and his colleagues. The documentary can be watched via NPO Start.
