Pavla Holcova
INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST
Pavla has contributed to major cross-border projects such as the Panama Papers, the Russian and Azerbaijani Laundromats, the Pegasus Project, the Pandora Papers, and the Russian Asset Tracker. Pavla, together with OCCRP, is nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 2023 for her work on "contributing to peace by unmasking political corruption and organized crime.
She was a human rights defender in Cuba for six years until 2013, where she was Head of the Cuban section of People In Need. There, she worked with dissident journalists, and with the families of political prisoners, trying to protect human rights and dignity. During her stay, she was detained for having documented human rights abuse in the country.
After this episode, in 2013, she founded the Czech Center for Investigate Journalism (investigace.cz), an independent news outlet where she supervised nine journalists that focus on cases of corruption and organized crime. She also joined at the same time the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) where she and her team worked to expose abuses of power in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In 2013, she collaborated with Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismail on a series of articles on the illegal business activities of the President of Azerbaijan and his family members. Both journalists won the Global Shining Light award for their work.In collaboration with a Macedonian reporter, she revealed in 2014 the secret investments of the former chief of the Macedonian secret service, who was forced to resign, leading to the fall of the Macedonian government. The journalists jointly won the European Union’s Investigative Journalism Award for their work.
In 2017 she won – as a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – the Pulitzer prize for the investigation on the Panama Papers. In 2018, she was selected for the European Young Leaders initiative . In 2019, she won the PRIX IRENE award for courage and the desire for truth. More recently, she won the Knight International Journalist Award after her investigation, started with her colleague Ján Kuciak and ended on her own. In 2018, they worked on a story exploring links between the Italian Mafia and the Slovak government when Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnirová, were murdered. Pavla Holcova was determined to finish the story on her own, but also investigate the murder of her friend and bring him the justice he deserved. The story is told in the OCCRP and Final Cut for Real documentary “The Killing of a Journalist.”