Parliament will not stop fighting for the justice that Daphne Caruana Galizia deserves  

Thank you, dear Vice-President, dear Pina,

Good evening, everyone.

Matthew, Corinne, Vera, thank you for being here tonight. Having you with us means a great deal to everyone in this room, and you are the reason that this evening is about more than just about an award.

Last Friday marked nine years since Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb, in broad daylight in our Malta, just metres away from her home. The horror and shock have not dissipated despite the passage of time. But while the scars remain unhealed, our grief has morphed into a determination to see a semblance of justice. To stand with Daphne’s family. To show that we in the European Parliament, like so many in Malta, will not allow this to be swept under the carpet. We will not allow her to be forgotten. We will not allow everything that she stood for to be disregarded at the altar of political convenience. This is what has shaped our thinking over the last decade. It is what drives this House forward and it is why we will keep going.

I don’t think any of us in Malta or in this Parliament were ever quite the same after that Black Monday in October of 2017. It was a seismic shift, the moment we realised that a journalist, a woman, a mother, could be assassinated in plain sight for exposing the corrupt, or that it had happened in our Europe, on our streets.

For nine years her sons and her family have carried on without her. And the past months in court brought it all flooding back, and once again we were left without the justice we are owed. The justice we needed. The justice Europe rightly demanded. The justice that Daphne’s formidable mother died without seeing.

Let me say tonight what this House has said, across political groups, every year since: we are not going anywhere. Promises of a full investigation have to be more than words. The public inquiry report must be implemented. We will keep going until anyone and everyone who planted the bomb, the mastermind who ordered it, or those who spent years trying to cover it up are all held to account. It is not too much to ask, and it cannot be too much to deliver.

Those who wanted Daphne silenced failed. Her stories travelled further than ever, and in Valletta our capital city, people still come back with candles and flowers. With portraits. With hope. 

Those of us who knew Daphne remember more than the investigative journalist. We miss her humour as much as her courage. Her criticism, sometimes biting, that made us want to be better politicians. Her pen that made us want to be better writers. Her recipes that made us all want to be better cooks. Her logic that made the complicated obvious.  

She should be here tonight.

And four months after Daphne, it happened again. Journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírová were shot in their home, shortly before they were due to be married. Jozef and Jana, Ján’s parents, have carried a grief no parent should ever have to carry, as they speak up for journalists they have never met.

This month also marks twenty years since Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in Moscow for telling the truth about the war in Chechnya. Our press room in Brussels carries her name, so that every journalist, and every one of us in this House, remembers what she gave.

Daphne, Ján and Anna refused to look away, and we can see that same refusal in the work of this year’s finalists. Congratulations to all of you. This Parliament will keep standing with you. Now that the anti-SLAPP rules we fought for are in force, we will be following very carefully how each Member State puts them into practice.

Thank you goes to the jury, to my colleague MEP David Casa, who brought this Prize to life and who never stopped fighting, and to Pina Picerno for all that she does, for her passion and personal commitment to the issues that matter to all of us. We’ve been working together on this for almost five years now, and we will not stop. This Prize matters to the European Parliament and to Europe. All the finalists deserve recognition. All of you who know that the front page has become the front line, we are grateful and we are with you. 

Thank you for carrying these names with such dignity. For Daphne, for Ján and Martina, for Anna, and for all the others, we will keep going. 

Thank you.