Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

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.

Big pharma is responsible for inventing and manufacturing hundreds of life-saving innovative drugs, but often those medications come with a hefty price tag. The Cancer Calculus is a global cross-border investigation into how Keytruda, a life-saving cancer drug, is unaffordable for millions across the world and how pharma giant Merck protects their billions in revenue from it.

This session will examine the different tools pharma companies use to protect their revenues, from creating an impenetrable fortress of patents around their drug, to promoting higher doses that boost revenues and wild variation in prices worldwide.

The speakers will walk you through how they approached this complex investigation, the difficulties in unraveling the pricing knots, and what they learned along the way.

The killing of journalists in Gaza and Lebanon, the detention of reporters in the West Bank, and the professional cancellation of journalists in European newsrooms are not separate phenomena occurring on different ends of a spectrum. They are expressions of a single pattern: the systematic suppression of any narrative that reflects the fact that there is a genocide and that crimes are committed by Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

The weapon varies by geography. In Gaza, it is a bomb and an assassination. In Europe, it is a dismissal letter, a defamation campaign, or an editorial guideline that makes certain words unspeakable. But the function is identical: to eliminate testimony, to narrow what can be reported, and to ensure that the story told is the story that power finds acceptable.

This panel examines that pattern as one coherent system. It asks how major European media institutions have become active participants in silencing voices in their own newsrooms: bowing to pressure that produces coverage which protects the oppressor. And why the journalism profession, which prides itself on defending press freedom, has increasingly accepted this as normal.