Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism

Abraji (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism) is a non-profit organization founded by a group of journalists looking to improve the quality of Brazilian journalism. It is supported by contribution from its members, sponsorship of its events and funding for its projects.

Abraji was founded in December 2002, two months after the seminar on Investigative Journalism: Ethics, Technique and Risks, organized in response to the murder of Globo journalist Tim Lopes, who was kidnapped and tortured in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro, that same year.

Since it was created, Abraji has remained faithful to its founding principles: professional training, defending freedom of speech and the right to access public information. Along the journey, Abraji has been promoting a series of events, courses and projects that contribute to its mission.

• Professional improvement of journalists
• Dissemination of investigative reporting concepts and techniques

• Defending freedom of speech and press freedom
• Vocational training
• The right to access public information

Main activities

• Projects and tools for journalists
• Holding of the International Congress of Investigative Journalism
• In-person and online courses
• Content hub: news and guides to practicing the profession

Projects

• Tim Lopes Program

  The Tim Lopes Program is Abraji’s response to violence against journalists, especially in the rural areas of Brazil. It is funded by Open Society Foundations and provides direct support to journalists who have been physically threatened, investigates deaths in the course of their work and, whenever possible, coordinates the continuation of investigations that the victim had been carrying out. The investigation into British journalist Dom Phillips and indigenous activist Bruno Pereira, who were killed in 2022 during a reporting trip in the Amazon region, is one example of the cases being monitored.

  At the end of 2023, the Tim Lopes Program started running a hub, formed by Abraji's team, to discuss how to support journalists' safety. The idea is to create a safer working environment. We aim to do that by putting together guides, lessons, interviews and reports on Abraji's platforms to help journalists. In 2024, the program began once again broadcasting its livestreams on Abraji's Instagram platform.

• Caravana Project

  Abraji’s Caravana Project was launched in October 2023. It is the association's first nationwide itinerant training activity. The project provides specialized training for local media organizations, promoting courses on journalism and issues related to the territory's circumstances.

  Caravana is coordinated by journalists Nina Weingrill, co-founder of the Énois Journalism Laboratory, and Thaís Cavalcante, co-founder of the Favela em Pauta portal. The project’s first training course on content production and community journalism took place in the Rocinha favela, in Rio de Janeiro. In 2024, it held its fourth in-person training course, on April 5th and 6th. The training brought together around 60 journalists, communicators and students at the Fronteira Sul Federal University (UFFS) in Chapecó, SC to share community journalistic practices and discuss networking strategies.

• Defensores Ambientais Project

  Created in 2023, Defensores Ambientais aims to promote environmental democracy and to protect environmental activists in Brazil. Bringing together five institutions (ABRAJI, Transparency International - Brazil, Centro de Vida Institute, Ethos Institute and Amazônia Nativa Operation), the project has five main goals:

  • Knowledge development
  • Training of environmental defenders
  • Offering technical support to public and private agents
  • Expanding the debate on access and protection rights
  • Promoting the Escazú Agreement
  
  

  Abraji works to select, mentor, provide security support in the field and train Brazilian journalists, especially those covering in the Amazon. In this context, the project organized a course in Belém, in August 2023, in which ten journalists were selected to be trained on environmental journalistic investigation, on producing stories on climate change and on the role of environmental defenders.

  Following the training, Abraji and the Center for Investigative Journalism selected three proposals for investigative reports on the climate crisis: “Extreme heat causes cassava shortages in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Land”, by Jullie Pereira, published in Inforamazônia; “Jari carbon credit project deceives communities and invades public lands in Pará”, published by journalist Carolina Bataier on the De Olho nos Ruralistas website and “Locals at the mouth of the Amazon River get a salty taste of climate change”, published in Mongbay by Rodrigo Pedroso and Rudja Santos.

• Pinpoint

  Abraji is one of the curators responsible for the Pinpoint project, a Google's Journalist Studio initiative. It is a tool for searching and analyzing PDFs, images with text, handwritten documents and audios in different languages.

  Since August 2021, Abraji has already uploaded 50 collections with public interest files to the platform. As well as simplifying access to this information, the idea is to enable journalists to use all the tool's features. Access to Pinpoint is free and the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool makes it easy to find names of people, companies and geographical locations in each document.

• LAI para Comunicadores Program

  In collaboration with the data agency Fiquem Sabendo, Abraji created a new free online workshop program in August 2023 to train media professionals in the use of the Law on Access to Information (LAI). It is an adaptation of the LAI nas Redações course, promoted in 2021, which introduced tools for obtaining public transparency data through the LAI.

  The program’s main goal is to help communicators and journalists involved in hyperlocal initiatives to report using data obtained through the law. Abraji and Fiquem Sabendo believe that using this resource to cover important issues in these communicators' territories is a way to strengthen journalism and transparency at a local level.

• Comprova Project

  Coordinated by Abraji, the Comprova Project is a collaborative fact-checking initiative that brings together the Brazilian media to combat disinformation. Created in 2018 and developed in Brazil by First Draft and the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School, Comprova's main goal is to spot and weaken the manipulation techniques and dissemination of misleading content that appear on hyper-partisan websites, messaging apps and social media.

  The project won the Press Freedom Award 2021 from the National Association of Newspapers. In 2023, Comprova published 220 reports and began producing video verifications to expand the reach of the reports on the main social media platforms.

• Legal Protection Program for Journalists

  Released in 2021, the Program, supported by Media Defence, a British organization, provides support to pay the costs of journalists who are being sued or who want to sue their aggressors.

  The Program includes a legal guidance partnership for victims of cyber-harassment, a collaboration between Abraji and the National Bar Association's Press Freedom Observatory.

  The aim is to provide legal assistance to up to six professionals within 18 months. A number of journalists have been assisted by the Program since July 2021. In 2024, two cases have been attended to so far: journalist Rafael Duarte and the Saiba Mais news agency, as well as journalists Alexandre Aprá, Pablo Rodrigo and Ulisses Lalio. In all cases, journalists have been attacked while carrying out their profession, reporting on facts of public interest.

• CruzaGrafos

  CruzaGrafos is a free software graphic tool, which provides easy access to multiple public databases, allowing you to cross-reference the names of companies and politicians. Launched in 2020 by Abraji and Brasil.IO, the project was designed by programmer and activist Álvaro Justen, with the support of the Google News Initiative.

  CruzaGrafos has been updating its database since 2021. It currently includes data from Brazil's Federal Revenue Service, electoral candidacies since 2014 and infraction notices from Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources). The project was a finalist in the Sigma Awards 2021.

• CTRL+X

  The project, funded by Google News Initiative, is Abraji's response to the growing number of cases of judicial censorship in Brazil - the awareness that there was an increase in requests for the removal of content by parties and politicians during the 2014 elections.

  It consists of an organized and reliable database to make it possible to evaluate the magnitude of the impact of content removal requests by politicians and parties. The collected data is available for browsing on the project's website. Users can browse an interactive infographic, filter information and download the content in spreadsheets.

• Achados e Pedidos

  Achados e Pedidos is a digital platform that collects thousands of requests under the Law on Access to Information (LAI). Created in 2017, its goal is to make it easier for any citizen to access public information and to create an extensive database that makes it possible to evaluate the service provided.

  The initiative uses AI to categorize the quality of order response in its database. In 2022, the project introduced the repLAI chatbot tool, through which journalists can get help to appeal denials of LAI requests. The project has three main goals:

  • To provide easier access to information;
  • To avoid repeated requests to the public administration;
  • To create a database that is broad enough to allow analysis of each body's satisfactory response rate, the number of appeals made, etc.
  
  
• Publique-se

  Released in September 2018, the project consists of a search tool for any public interest lawsuits involving politicians. It indexes thousands of legal cases of public interest and their status.

  The initiative is a partnership with Transparency International - Brazil and provides a collection of documents that was updated until 2022 with the automated search of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and Superior Court of Justice (STJ) databases.

  The goal is to help reporters and researchers with journalistic investigations about public office candidates. The project provides easier access to reports and documents attached to these legal proceedings. As an example, Abraji found 781 lawsuits involving 451 candidates for the 2020 municipal elections.

• Aleph

  Aleph is a “follow the money” project by OCCRP (Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project), which partnered up with Abraji in 2022. It consists of an investigative tool which brings together a range of data from Brazil, including documents to trace government spending, corporate assets and properties and information on individuals and groups of journalistic interest.

  Over the course of 2022 and 2023, Aleph began to include new public interest databases. Easier access to this information helps journalists in their investigations and reports on relevant political issues. The tool is available in 142 countries and brings together more than 500 databases, which can be cross-referenced.

• Monitoring of Judicial Harassment against Journalists

  Abraji’s Monitoring of Judicial Harassment against Journalists in Brazil stands out for being the latest example of work that led to practical advocacy and strategic litigation by Abraji. In May 2024, the Federal Supreme Court (STF) acknowledged the practice of judicial harassment as a way of curbing the work of the press and the right of citizens to stay informed. All the ministers present at the session followed the vote of the Court's president, Luís Roberto Barroso, who ruled in favor of ADI (Direct Action of Unconstitutionality) 7055, proposed by Abraji.

Abraji is also known for holding the International Congress of Investigative Journalism, an event that takes place every year: a major conference on investigative journalism, which offers around 100 sessions developed by highly regarded researchers and instructors. Abraji’s Congress is one of the largest journalism events in Latin America and has been held since 2005.

The activities promoted during the annual event always address a variety of topics about today's society and the journalism field. New investigative tools and the impact of political and technological changes on the press are discussed.

The 19th International Congress of Investigative Journalism held between July 11th and 14th, 2024, was the biggest on-site edition in Abraji’s history. This edition brought together journalists from Brazil's peripheries, rural areas and indigenous communities to share their experiences, techniques and strategies for practicing journalism from different perspectives.

The 19th Congress had both an in-person and online schedule, with a wide range of topics, organized in different sections. There were 163 in-person activities on different themes, such as: investigation techniques; independent and local journalism; diversity, equity and inclusion; misinformation and fact-checking; protection of journalists; access to public data and information, etc. More than 1800 participants attended the event.