About

Mission

The purpose of our work is to help bring the truth to light in cases where it is obstructed by powerful interests.

To do this, we put the tools of digital investigation to work in the service of transparency and the public interest. We investigate mainly alleged acts of violence and violations of fundamental freedoms or human rights, with a particular focus on police violence.

Our work extends to every arena where truth and justice are negotiated: judicial proceedings, the press and media, forums and institutions, and spaces of public discourse. Our investigations are picked up by leading media outlets; our expert reports are regularly added to the case files of the proceedings concerned. We also work to spread the methods of digital investigation across civil society, through training workshops and public talks.

Expertise

Our areas of expertise include open-source investigation, audiovisual analysis, and the digital reconstruction of events. In the lineage of Forensic Architecture, we specialise in the spatial approach to digital investigation: from images, testimonies, traces, and fragments of data of all kinds, we piece scenes back together and model environments to reconstruct the sequence of events and put it to the test of verification.

Index is the only organisation in France to offer this type of independent expert analysis as a public-interest service, accessible to all. The donations and grants we receive let us produce in-depth analyses and reports for individuals and groups who often lack the means to pay for them, but for whom they are sometimes the only recourse against the denial of the facts.

Alongside this, we provide advanced digital investigation services to law firms, media outlets, NGOs, institutions, audiovisual production companies, and research laboratories.

Since 2020, our evidence and analyses have supported numerous court cases, and we have published more than 25 public-interest investigations in partnership with leading media outlets and organisations: Le Monde, Disclose, France TV, Libération, Il Manifesto, Rolling Stone, Forensic Architecture, VII Foundation, B’Tselem…

Team

Governance

Index Investigation is a non-profit association registered in France under the 1901 law on associations. Its board of directors has five members:

Yessa Belkhodja

Decolonial activist

Lucie Simon

Lawyer at the Paris Bar

Kaoutar Harchi

Sociologist, writer

Michel Feher

Philosopher, author

Mathieu Molard

Journalist, editor-in-chief of StreetPress

Funding

Index is a strictly non-profit organisation. Its work is funded by donations – from individuals and foundations – given with nothing expected in return and no strings attached, as well as by paid expert analysis work.

Index’s independence rests on the support of more than 1,200 individual donors and on the trust of leading foundations and institutions:

Press

Below is a selection of the main interviews and articles about Index’s work published in the press.