ICIJ’s investigations into systemic failures highlighted in 2025 annual report
The systems that shape our world — financial rules, sanctions regimes, international policing networks — are supposed to prevent abuse, promote accountability and protect the public.
Our reporting in 2025 showed how often they don’t — and who pays the price when they fail.
Across investigations that spanned continents, ICIJ and its partners found that the harm we exposed didn’t come from broken systems alone. In many cases, ordinary processes worked exactly as intended. Paperwork was processed, transactions were approved and rules were followed — even as they enabled human suffering, repression, financial crime and sanctions evasion.
Read ICIJ’s 2025 annual report
In our China Targets investigation, we documented how Beijing authorities aggressively pursued its perceived enemies across borders, following them into countries that the dissidents had thought would protect them. We examined Interpol notices, United Nations forums and law enforcement requests that appeared routine on paper but carried devastating consequences for victims, who described relentless threats, pressure and intimidation that jeopardized their safety, livelihoods and families.
In The Coin Laundry, reporters exposed how cryptocurrency platforms and payment processors became gateways for scams and money laundering. Victims lost their life savings through systems designed for speed and profit, where warnings were weak, oversight was fragmented and accountability was optional. The exchanges processed vast volumes of high-risk transactions while both public and private safeguards failed to keep pace with the scale and speed of abuse.
And in Damascus Dossier, we traced how Syria’s bureaucratic detention system reduced mass murder to routine paperwork — and how international sanctions and accountability mechanisms failed to disrupt it.
Together, these ICIJ investigations show how ordinary systems that citizens rely on for protection — financial, institutional and governmental — were manipulated and exploited to help the powerful and malfeasant avoid accountability.
https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2025/10/icij-members-and-partners-honored-with-cabot-prize/
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