Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

The session will reflect on Swiss newsroom WAV Collective's year-long collaborative investigative projects – Invisible Walls and Big Business at the Borders – looking at automated border systems across Europe and asking who benefits from the push in AI in migration and border control.

Their reporting combined on-the-ground investigation in Greece with policy research in Brussels and institutional analysis in Switzerland and the U.K. They will give a step-by-step explanation on how they traced flows of money, data and accountability across borders and institutions.

What they'll cover in this talk:
- how to understand the systems, tools and implications of AI (even if you’re not a techie!).
- how to distinguish between proposed capabilities, funded projects, and implemented systems when it comes to reporting on tech.
- how to understand the functions of such systems, instead of relying on labels.
- And how to dissect the language that is often used to obfuscate real-world implications of tech.

Participants will learn how cross-border, collaborative teams can tackle investigations of complex, opaque systems that operate in regulatory grey areas and are often deliberately fragmented. Insights from this session will not only be valuable to colleagues working on similar topics, but useful to anyone investigating fragmented yet connected systems across different countries.

Trusting your doctor is something you should be able to take for granted. Bad Practice, a collaboration co-led by OCCRP, The Times of London, and VG of Norway, exposed a European health scandal that has brought that into question.

The project identified at least 100 doctors who had been banned from practicing by medical regulators in one country but remained licensed to work in another. The stories have had a major impact, with governments across Europe and the European Commission pledging to crack down on the issue.

While a lot of cross-border projects rely on a central leak, this project required us to build a dataset from scratch by obtaining as many lists of doctors' licenses and doctors' medical disciplines as possible. This session will set out how we were able to make these findings, and the lessons we learned from building our database from fragmented records across jurisdictions, and then, once we identified likely matches, how we proved these doctors were still practicing. We would explain what went well, what didn't, and our ambitions for the future of the project as we add more countries from around the world to our database.

Attendees need no prior knowledge, just an interest in how to build cross-border investigations into regulated professions.