About
Andrei Popoviciu is an independent investigative journalist, foreign correspondent, audio producer, videographer and photographer covering human rights, humanitarian crises, conflict, international development and foreign affairs stories across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. His work was featured in Lighthouse Reports, Al Jazeera English, the Telegraph, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy magazine, the Associated Press, In These Times magazine, Washington Post, El Pais, IRPI Media, Libération, Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, the New Humanitarian, VICE World News, Christian Science Monitor, Middle East Eye, El Diario, Voxeurop, Tagesschau, Forbes Africa, the Calvert Journal, Publico.pt, Scena9, PressOne, Libertatea and other media.
He has reported from over a dozen countries, including Palestine, Israel, Senegal, The Gambia, Lebanon, Chad, Moldova, Mauritania, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others. Andrei earned his bachelor's degree in international relations and war studies from King's College London and his double master's degree in journalism and international human rights and humanitarian law from Sciences Po Paris. He usually works in repressive countries with repressive an completed his hostile environment and first aid training as a Rory Peck Trust grantee.
Together with an international consortium of journalists, Andrei investigated violent and illegal deportations called pushbacks at the European Union's external borders. The cross-border collaboration into 'Europe's Shadow Armies' exposed through ground reporting, OSINT and money trails how national police forces are pushing back asylum-seekers in the Balkans and the Aegean sea. Andrei was the first journalist to ever obtain visual evidence of pushbacks from Romania to Serbia. The team's work has won a string of international awards, including the De Tegel Award, the IJ4EU Impact Award, the Fetisov Award, and has been nominated for several others.
In 2022, Andrei won the Ján Kuciak Award for Investigative Journalism for his reporting on the EU's deployment of an arsenal of surveillance technologies used by national police forces to pushback and violently beat up asylum seekers at the EU's external borders. For his work covering border violence in Europe he was one of three nominees for the One World Media's New Voice Award.
Andrei also reported on the mental health conditions in French migrant detention centres, the secret world of back channel diplomacy and the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, focusing on refugees and security issues in Romania and Moldova. For his coverage of the plight of Ukrainian Roma refugees, he was shortlisted for the Journalists Excellence Award in Global Event Category. He produced a four-part audio series on Palestinian youth resisting the Israeli occupation through culture and an explanatory audio story about controversies surrounding Frontex, the EU's border agency. In 2022, Andrei earned the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) to report on how a tech boom triggered a housing crisis in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. He won the third prize in his year's fellowship cohort for his piece. The same year he also reported on infectious diseases and immunisation from the Democratic Republic of the Congo as part of a UN Foundation Press Fellowship.
In 2023, he won the Gold and Listener's Choice Award in the documentary category at the Signal Awards for the co-production of a Kerning Cultures audio documentary about children of asylum seekers in Sweden suffering from a mysterious medical syndrome. The same year, Andrei was featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 Europe list. Thanks to a grant from the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting he reported for the American magazine In These Times on the EU’s militarisation of African borders and anti-migration investments in Senegal, for which he won the European Press Prize Migration Journalism Award and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting and the One World Media's Freelance Journalist of the Year Award. His piece was republished as a four-part series in Le Monde.
Andrei continued to cover the human rights impact of EU development funds in Africa and uncovered how an EU-funded counter terrorism unit was used to crush democratic protests in Senegal. Following his investigation the EU Parliament asked the Commission to open an inquiry into mismanagement of EU funds, while the Spanish parliament demanded its government to open an inquiry and stop selling military equipment to Senegal. The same year he contributed to an international investigation that revealed how North African countries have been using EU funds to racially profile and dump Black Africans suspected of migrating to Europe in the Sahara desert.
You can reach him at andrei.victor.popoviciu [at] gmail [dot] com