2023 Panel of Judges:
Two permanent judges represent out funders the Valley Trust, Wits Centre for Journalism and the international media. They are assisted by judges appointed each year.
Tom Cloete is a Judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein. He is also one of the five trustees of The Valley Trust, a trust set up by the late Taco Kuiper to promote investigative journalism.
Cloete studied law at Rhodes University and at Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was admitted to the South African bar in 1975 and also practised in Botswana and Swaziland.
In 1991, two years after becoming Senior Counsel, Cloete was appointed to the Johannesburg High Court. He was the Senior Judge of the Commercial Court in Johannesburg until he was elevated to the Appeal Court. He has also served on the High Court of the Kingdom of Swaziland and as an ad hoc Judge of Appeal in Seychelles.
Sarah Carter works for the US television network CBS, based in Johannesburg. She has won awards for several programmes including Death by Denial on Aids in Africa and her investigation into South Africa’s apartheid-era chemical and biological warfare programme. She teaches the Masters in International Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism, UBC, Canada. In 2010 her students won an Emmy for their PBS/Frontline documentary Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground, which traced the path of electronic waste around the globe to Ghana, China and India.
Beauregard Tromp is a veteran investigative journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is an Africa editor with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. He previously served as deputy editor at The Mail & Guardian newspaper.
For Beauregard, the most fulfilling aspect of journalism is the privilege of telling the stories of ordinary people and their uniquely, extraordinarily complex lives. Over the course of his journalism career, he has traversed much of the African continent, bearing witness to seismic events like the so-called Arab Spring, the end of strongmen Daniel arap Moi and Robert Mugabe and civil wars in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi.
Beauregard has won numerous awards for his work, including Mondi Shanduka journalist of the year, Vodacom journalist of the year and CNN/Multichoice African print journalist of the year. He has previously worked at publications including The Sunday Times, the Independent Group as Africa Correspondent and eAfrica satellite television news channel as a senior producer. He was also a 2013 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a visiting Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of Miami, a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University, and a founding member of the Forum of Black Journalists. He holds a degree in journalism from the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of a biography of liberation fighter Chris Hani.
Khadija Sharife is an award-winning investigative journalist based in South Africa. With a focus on global illicit financial flows, political economy, and environmental predation, Khadija has contributed to investigations about illegal logging in Madagascar, grand corruption in Angola and commodity traders fueling arms trafficking in Cote d’Ivoire. She is the former director of Platform for the Protection of Whistleblowers and is a board member of Finance Uncovered.
Khadija previously led an African chapter of the EU’s Environmental Justice Liability and Trade project, overseeing research, policy, and investigation into ecological trade and corruption fueling conflict. She contributed to the book “Tax Us If You Can: Why Africa Should Stand Up for Tax Justice.” Khadija has a Master of Laws degree and is a 2021 Yale Poynter Fellow in Journalism.
