The assassination of Maltese invastigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia

Three months to the day of Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination, Luxembourgish MP Anne Brasseur (ALDE), Dutch MP Pieter Omtzigt (EPP) and German MP Frank Schwabe (SOC) announce an event to be held in her honour in the margins of the winter session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 22 January 2018. 

The cross-party group of MPs will host Daphne Caruana Galizia’s three sons, Matthew, Andrew and Paul Caruana Galizia, who will talk about the context that enabled their mother’s assassination, the most important strands of her investigative work and why the ongoing investigation into her assassination demands close international scrutiny. Daphne Caruana Galizia was Malta’s most prominent journalist. 

A household name in the country for three decades, she was best known among fellow journalists internationally for her Panama Papers reporting. Her most important investigative work uncovered corruption at the highest levels of Malta’s government, and its links to authoritarian regimes. 

Her assassination in a car bomb attack a few metres from her home in Malta sent shockwaves around the world, raising concerns internationally about the rule of law and corruption in the Mediterranean island where she was born and worked. Daphne Caruana Galizia’s assassination is a crime against all of us. It has serious consequences in at least five main areas of the Council of Europe’s work:

• human rights
• corruption
• money laundering
• the rule of law
• the protection of journalists.

The crime and corruption Daphne Caruana Galizia uncovered and the investigation into her assassination demand the immediate and continuing attention of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, including through the appointment of a special rapporteur to shed light on the broader aspects surrounding the crime and to monitor the ongoing murder investigation.

The event is supported by eight INGOs:

• Committee to Protect Journalists
• Reporters Sans Frontières
• European Federation of Journalists
• International News Safety Institute
• Association of European Journalists
• Polish Society of Journalists
• Transparency International
• International Press Institute.