Our Mission

EXPOSING INJUSTICE

Liberty Investigates is an editorially independent team of journalists investigating human rights abuses in the UK. We are part of Liberty. We aim to uncover injustice, hold the powerful to account and to empower others to defend their own rights and those of their families, friends and communities.

Letter from Liberty’s director

Liberty was founded in 1934 in response to the brutal policing of peaceful protestors. Our founders – HG Wells, EM Forster, Clement Attlee and Vera Brittain among them – pledged to stand vigil against abuses of power. Over the decades we’ve fought fascism, championed free speech, demanded equality and challenged intolerance, unfairness and injustice.

Liberty has been standing up to power for nearly a century and our work is as vital now as it has ever been.

I became the Director of Liberty in 2016. Since then the world has changed dramatically. We face profound threats to our rights and freedoms: technology heralds intrusive mass surveillance, populism denies minority rights, polarisation undermines community cohesion and misinformation undermines accountability and inequalities deepen.

In the past few weeks these threats to our rights have become ever more acute as coronavirus has plunged us into a public health crisis on a previously unimaginable scale. In the UK, we now face the greatest restrictions on freedom in a generation.

Liberty has been standing up to power for nearly a century and our work is as vital now as it has ever been. We fight for progress in Parliament, in the courts, in the streets and in the press.

Throughout its history Liberty has worked with journalists to uncover stories that shine a light on the injustices in our society. Dramatic changes in the media landscape have changed how news is reported and investigative journalism has had to work hard to keep its footing. With each year, new threats emerge.

And so the idea for Liberty Investigates was born. An editorially independent unit of journalists working to expose injustice. Liberty Investigates shares Liberty’s mission and values. It is committed to working in the public interest to tell the truth about rights abuses in the UK. Like Liberty, our investigative unit is guided by evidence and expertise, not political agenda, profit or popular opinion.

Our journalists are not afraid to reveal uncomfortable truths, injustice or the abuse of power. The crisis created by coronavirus makes these values more important than ever, and we have changed the focus of the unit’s investigations to reflect this.

Journalism is the key to holding the powerful to account and I am proud to add more resource to this vital mechanism of our democracy.

Letter from the Liberty Investigates team

We set up our non-profit newsroom in autumn 2019 to report on human rights concerns in the UK. We publish our work on the Liberty Investigates website as well as in partnership with other news organisations, to bring our reporting to a wider audience.

We are editorially independent of Liberty but understand Liberty’s proud history defending human rights. We want our work, once published, to be part of the toolkit used by campaigners at Liberty and elsewhere to drive positive change in the UK’s institutions and laws, as well as in the private sphere.

Human rights journalism is about everything from high-level policy failures to smaller, more intimate wrongs, such as what happens in the everyday lives of people of colour, disabled people, or communities segregated due to prejudice and discrimination, such as Roma people.

We have a simple mission – to expose injustice. We want to hold those responsible to account. We also want to amplify the voices of those affected, positioning ourselves alongside them. We commit to being fair to the subjects of our investigations, reporting deeply, offering the right to reply, and fact-checking thoroughly.

If you want to help, get in touch!