Continuing the Work of a ‘One-Woman WikiLeaks’

One year ago this month, the best-known and most feared journalist in Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was assassinated by a car bomb as she left her house on the tiny Mediterranean island. Her violent murder, still unsolved, might have stayed the stuff of local news. But on Malta, local news turns out to be global.

Caruana Galizia’s murder has always been a test for Malta and for Europe, one that neither has yet passed. The year since her death may have shown the failure—or at least the resistance—of institutions  to solve the crime, reining in corruption, upholding the rule of law, and protecting journalists. But it has also served as a triumph of investigative journalism.

Before her death, Caruana Galizia had been pulling at the threads that connected the powers-that-be on the island—a member of the European Union that has adopted the euro—to all manner of international operations. She feared that her native on her pithy blog, Running Commentary, was “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”