How do you report on a closed dictatorship with an oppressed yet defiant population? Journalist Nilo Tabrizy is an open-source investigative journalist who covers Iran for Reuters.
For Western media, it is almost impossible to provide an accurate picture of what is happening in Iran. One of the most reliable methods to do so is through open-source reporting, which uses publicly available data to reconstruct events and verify facts. Nilo Tabrizy previously did this work for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Among other investigations, she reported on the missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school at the start of the war, in which about 165 students were killed. How do you conduct data-driven investigations in a country notorious for internet blackouts?
Earlier, Tabrizy covered the Woman, Life, Freedom movement demonstrations that erupted in Iran in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Jîna Amini. About these events, Tabrizy wrote the book For the Sun After Long Nights, whose Dutch translation, Zusters in Iran (Zwartjes & Labovic), was recently published. In conversation with Tabrizy, on the current situation in Iran and what it means to report on the country that she and her family once fled themselves.
Speakers
World Press Freedom under attack
‘Investigating had never been more dangerous.’ That is the conclusion drawn by journalistic platform Forbidden Stories from its survey of threatened journalists. A conversation with founder Laurent Richard about the worsening state of global press freedom.
How does a society move forward after atrocity? After war? Genocide? Linda Kinstler (a journalist for The Economist and a scholar at Harvard University) studies ‘oblivion’, a collective process of forgiveness and forgetting. A process of pardoning. Not to let people off the hook, but rather to acknowledge their guilt in a meaningful way. Because: ‘a pardon confirms the crime.’
After initially being denied entry by the Dutch government, De Balie is pleased to welcome Pavel Krisevich. Artist Pavel Krisevich was held in Russia’s prison system for 3,5 years after staging performance art in support of political prisoners in Russia. Last year, Krisevich was released and will now speak at De Balie.
