The 4 Modern Slavery jury members go public

For each of its different grant programmes Journalismfund Europe works with a separate, independent jury. All of the juries consist of experienced investigative journalism experts.

Our jury members remain anonymous until they leave the jury. This is to protect both the jury process and the confidentiality of the submitted investigation proposals. After their mandate is finished, we make the names of the jury members public.

Today we reveal four jury members of our Modern Slavery Unveiled project, which offered grants to (teams of) journalists to investigate the exploitation of Asian victims of human trafficking and forced labour in Europe.

Chay Hofileña

Among Rappler's senior editors and founders, Chay Hofileña was former managing editor and now heads Rappler’s Investigative Desk – Newsbreak – and is in charge of training. Before joining Rappler, she was a contributing writer of Newsbreak Magazine and was one of its founding editors, too, in 2001. Chay co-wrote with Miriam Grace Go "Ambition, Destiny, Victory: Stories from a Presidential Election" (2011) on the 2010 elections.

She has written on media issues and authored the book, "News for Sale: The Corruption and Commercialization of the Philippine Media (2004)," published by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. She obtained her graduate degree from Columbia University School of Journalism in New York and is a lecturer at the undergraduate level of the Ateneo de Manila University. She has been the recipient of awards from the Jaime V Ongpin Awards for Excellence in Journalism.

Former director of the Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo, Chay also teaches News Writing and Investigative Journalism to undergraduate students. She is drawn to journalism because it allows her to write stories that have the potential to make a difference.

Kieran Guilbert

Kieran Guilbert is an award-winning journalist and editor based in London, with expertise in human rights, aid and development, climate change and modern slavery.

Kieran is currently a sub-editor for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, where he spent several years in various roles including West Africa Correspondent, News Editor, and Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking Editor. Most recently, he was the Deputy International Editor for The Independent newspaper in the UK.

Kieran’s reporting has exposed how the UK has deported survivors of modern slavery despite fears over re-trafficking, and denied asylum to a rising number of child victims. He has also commissioned and edited award-winning investigations into Russia's war crimes in Ukraine, forced labour at Indian garment factories, Brazilian coffee plantations and fishing vessels in Thailand.

Sherry Lee

Sherry Hsueh-Li Lee is the editor-in-chief of The Reporter, Taiwan’s first non-profit media organization. The Reporter focuses on in-depth reportage and investigative journalism and publishes its output on an open-source website. Lee endeavors to explore new possibilities of journalism and to facilitate more cross-border collaborations in investigative journalism. She is the board member of the Environmental Reporting Collective (ERC),a network of journalists dedicated to investigating environmental crimes.
 
In the past five years, she has authored two award-winning books, Far Sea Fishery And Slavery At Sea (2017) and In Their Teens, In Their Ruin (2018). She won the Best Editor of the Year Award of Taipei International Book Exhibition for her co-authored and edited book Fiery Tides (2020), a book on Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement. In 2022, she edited a book on the Russian invasion in Ukrainian, War in Ukraine (2022). Lee is also a faculty of practice at the graduate school of journalism of National Taiwan University.

Edouard Perrin

Edouard Perrin is a French investigative reporter since 1997. In 2011 he joined Premières Lignes, an independent tv production and news agency based in Paris. Among many journalistic awards, he received the Grand Prix for Journalism at the Prix des Assises Internationales du Journalisme 2017. He was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan (2016). He was awarded the "Journalist of the Year" award at the "2016 Assises du Journalisme" in France and was on the 2016 Politico Europe list. For the Panama Papers investigation, he is a joint recipient with ICIJ of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. Edouard was a juror for Journalismfund Europe’s Money Trail grant programme from 2018 until 2021, and also a juror of the Modern Slavery Unveiled grant programme from 2021 until March 2023. 

59 proposals

The four journalists were jury members from March 2021 until March 2023. For the Modern Slavery Unveiled grant programme they assessed 59 project proposals and granted in total more than €319,506 to 25 investigations by 76 journalists from four different continents.

You can take a look at the supported Modern Slavery Unveiled stories here.

Here’s an overview of Journalismfund Europe’s former jury members.

Two other former jury members give tips on how a good application should look like: “If you want a grant, here’s what you should do.”