An independent jury has selected 12 cross-border teams for funding under the latest round of IJ4EU’s grant and support scheme for journalists outside newsroom structures.
Run by the European Journalism Centre (EJC), the Freelancer Support Scheme is designed for teams composed predominantly of freelancers who collaborate on transnational investigations into topics of public interest in Europe and beyond. It offers funding, mentoring, training and networking opportunities.
The selected projects
The external jury awarded a total of €199,181 to 12 investigative projects. The successful teams involve 38 journalists based in 21 countries.
Here are summaries of the successful investigations and the awarded amounts, in no particular order:
- Two journalists in Italy and Albania will assess the impact of an offshore migrant detention centre beyond the EU’s borders, calculating the true cost of the project and the number of asylum requests processed, uncovering cases of human rights violations and financial corruption, and evaluating the scheme’s influence on public opinion. (€17,465)
- A cross-border investigation by two journalists in Spain and Italy looking into the use of questionable practices in nursing homes in the EU (€12,950)
- A cross-border investigation by freelance journalists covering European private security companies (€19,550)
- A cross-border team will investigate how the EU Sustainable Fishing Partnership Agreement with Madagascar fulfils the economic interest of French and Spanish tuna lobbies while contributing to the depletion of tuna stocks and failing to provide structural support to local fishing communities. (€19,820)
- A cross-border team of journalists will investigate how, by emitting more CO2 than officially declared and heavily lobbying in favour of delayed CO2 targets, carmakers undermine the EU decarbonisation plan. The journalists aim to expose the misuse of public incentive schemes in France, Italy, Hungary and Romania, showing that taxpayers’ money does not contribute to reducing CO2 emissions as much as carmakers claim and continues to subsidise the sale of vehicles that are harmful to climate and health. (€13,975)
- An investigation into how a lack of implementation of EU law across several European countries is tearing asylum-seeking families apart (€19,899)
- A team of two freelance journalists will explore how migration persists along the Belarusian route despite heightened border security and anti-immigration policies in Poland and Germany. They will investigate a shift in asylum-seeking patterns, the implementation of asylum regulations between the two countries and government actions and their role in driving undocumented movements across Europe. The goal is to expose systemic failures in offering legal protection, the impact of shifting responsibility between nations and the human toll of these policies. (€18,700)
- A cross-border investigation using freedom-of-information requests, policy analysis and testimony gathering will examine the impacts of the EU-Egypt strategic partnership and border externalisation agreements on the selective migration of Sudanese refugees. (€19,996)
- A cross-border team will investigate an industry’s wrongdoings that are responsible for an undercovered public health threat throughout Europe. (€12,081)
- A cross-border team of journalists from Italy and Romania will investigate an illegal poaching network linking the Danube Delta in Romania to the Po Delta in Italy. (€13,600)
- A cross-border team of independent reporters from Europe and Iraq will investigate the impact of industrial activities on water scarcity in southern Iraq. (€11,145)
- A cross-border team of five freelance journalists will investigate Europe’s struggle to rehouse exotic animals, a crisis caused by stricter welfare regulations in several countries and exacerbated by an influx of animals from the war in Ukraine. (€20,000)
About the Freelancer Support Scheme
The Freelancer Support Scheme is one of two grant schemes offered by the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund, which supports cross-border, collaborative journalism in the European Union and beyond.
The Freelancer Support Scheme runs in parallel to the Investigation Support Scheme, managed by the International Press Institute.
Following the latest call for applications, a separate independent jury awarded almost €475,000 in funding to 13 cross-border reporting teams under the Investigation Support Scheme.
The next call for proposals under both schemes will open on January 13, 2025.Interested in learning more about projects previously funded by IJ4EU? Check out the projects section on the IJ4EU site.