The Gecko Project honoured by Society of Environmental Journalists
“A remarkable example of brave, tenacious journalism, methodically unravelling systemic corruption in Indonesia extending to the highest levels of the judiciary”
Our April 2018 story, Ghosts in the machine, has been awarded third place in the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding In-depth Reporting.
Ghosts in the machine, the result of a collaboration with Mongabay, told the story of how a politician in Indonesian Borneo used a series of land deals to build a multi-million dollar war-chest to fight a corrupt election campaign. Some of the money was used to bribe the Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, in a case that electrified Indonesia and led to the jailing of both the judge and the politician. Our investigation traced the source of the money and demonstrated how the land deals had an insidious — and ongoing — impact on the people and rainforests of Borneo.
The SEJ judges wrote of our story: “A remarkable example of brave, tenacious journalism, methodically unravelling systemic corruption in Indonesia extending to the highest levels of the judiciary. Few consumers in North America can fully appreciate the human and environmental toll exacted by the palm oil industry. In that sense, this story should make us all think more critically about the true cost of our actions, at home and around the world.”
You can find the story here, and watch a super-short film about it below.
