Al Jazeera Investigations
Ali Fowle, Fiona MacGregor, Drew Ambrose and Burma VJ Network,
Ali Fowle is a freelance journalist and documentary maker who lives in Edinburgh. She focuses mostly on conflict, human rights and civil disobedience across the Asia-Pacific region where she was based between 2009-2021 and has worked extensively on stories about extractive industries, illicit trade and trafficking, surveillance, justice and press freedom.
Fiona MacGregor is an investigative journalist working across the Asia-Pacific and Scotland. She has reported on human rights, war, the environment and wildlife in media and humanitarian settings for over two decades. Her reporting draws on her academic work in international law where she specialises in forced displacement, trafficking and conflict-related sexual violence.
Drew Ambrose is one of Al Jazeera English’s most experienced longform journalists who has produced more than 180 documentaries in 45 countries. Aside from working as a roving correspondent in the programmes division, he has been the creator and editorial leader on a number of video series and digital projects for the news network.
The Burma VJ Network is an exiled media organization whose brave collective of underground filmmakers in Myanmar expose atrocities and abuses across the authoritarian war-torn country.
Their shortlisted pieces were:
- Myanmar: War With the Junta
- Myanmar’s Urban Assassins
- Al Jazeera investigations reveals claims of atrocities by Myanmar’s rebel forces
- Al Jazeera investigations uncovered brutal tactics used by Myanmar’s junta against dissidents
Al Jazeera Investigations’ reporting on Myanmar is fearless, forensic and of enormous scope. In exposing the junta’s systematic torture while also confronting the moral ambiguities of rebel misconduct, the documentary series refuses the comfort of simplified narratives, bringing home the horror of the conflict. It’s a portrait of a fractured country that bears witness to brutality with discipline, courage and moral seriousness. In the best Orwellian tradition, it turns political reporting into an act of truth-telling: unsentimental, exacting and alive to the human cost of power.
– Greg Williams, Chair of Judges, The Orwell Prize for Journalism 2026
