Investigative journalist who identified Salisbury poisoners receives University of Leicester honour

The founder of an award-winning investigative journalism collective which identified the Salisbury poisoners has been honoured by the University of Leicester.

Eliot Higgins was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws during a graduation ceremony held at De Montfort Hall, in Leicester, today (Thursday 16 January).

He is the founder and current leader of investigative journalism group Bellingcat, which is best-known for identifying who poisoned Russian dissident Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in Salisbury, as well as the Russian politician Alexei Navalny.

Eliot is a pioneer in the use of social media and open-source investigations to probe and sometimes solve global crimes. Open-source journalism uses publicly available data, such as social media posts, satellite imagery and mobile phone recordings to investigate and report on news stories.

He said: “It's a great honour to receive this honorary award and I hope it acts as a reminder that innovation can come from anywhere, especially in the age of the internet.”

Eliot came to prominence during the early stages of the conflict in Syria, when he started blogging from his Leicester home about open-source images being shared online from the conflict.

Interest in his work and open-source investigation grew and he launched Bellingcat in 2014, a website intended to provide a place to learn how to do open-source investigations and to contribute investigative work. It quickly became known internationally thanks to the work of its community on the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over Ukraine in 2014.

Today, Bellingcat is a multi-award winning investigative collective focused on online open-source investigation. Its work has led the way in developing the use of online open-source investigation in a wide variety of fields, from journalism to justice and accountability, and is widely recognised as a leader in the development of online open-source investigation.

Eliot has won a host of awards for his work, including the Treaties of Nijmegen medal, the Magnitsky Human Rights Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalist (International), the Golden Nica Ars Electronica prize for Digital Communities and the Hanns Joachim Friedrichs Award for Excellence in Journalism. He is also a former member of the technical advisory board of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

He has published the Sunday Times bestseller, We Are Bellingcat, and has held appointments at the University of California Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, King’s College London and in the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and Future Europe Initiative projects.

President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, Professor Nishan Canagarajah, said: “Eliot’s determination to get to the truth of high-profile wrongdoings is a lesson for all journalists.

“His passion for human rights, coupled with his expertise in using publicly available data, has led to Bellingcat becoming leaders in the field of open-source investigations, allowing them to play an instrumental role in delivering justice.”