Supported projects

MONDELLO - Every year millions of European tourists crowd Italy's diverse beaches, visiting ancient seaside towns and bathing in the Mediterranean Sea’s warm, azure waters. But while some enjoy themselves among the colourful parasols and picture-perfect scenery, others are fighting for survival.

PUNJABI - BELGRADE - India and Serbia have enjoyed visa-on-arrival policy between 2017 and 2023. Investigation revealed a nexus between Indian travel agents who would connect these migrants with donkers (human smugglers) in Serbia, who further helped them cross international borders via countries like Hungary, Romania, North Macedonia, Greece, Spain, and Italy. 

AMSTERDAM - There is an invisible workforce keeping homes in the Netherlands spotless. Filipino cleaners run about Dutch cities each day, their packs filled with dozens of jingling keys. They are part of a community of thousands of undocumented migrants who clean homes in the Netherlands. They're indispensable but kept unseen.

GITEGA - The Burundi Balkan Route offered several thousand Burundians a way out of their homeland in crisis in 2022.

BRUSSELS - How Nigerian girls are forced into Belgian prostitution. In 2018, 21-year-old Eunice Osayande is murdered on the streets of Brussels. The Nigerian woman was smuggled into Belgium with the false promise of becoming a hairdresser here and having a better life than in Nigeria.

GUINEA/SERBIA/THE NETHERLANDS - According to Europol, the smuggling of songbirds and other tropical birds to the European Union (EU) has skyrocketed in recent years, especially along the Balkans trafficking route.

PALERMO – The Italian market for sushi has surged over the last decade and is now one of its most popular foreign cuisines. Sicily – which like many regions of Italy is fiercely proud of its regional food culture – has nevertheless seen a recent food revolution with sushi restaurants and poke bowl joints appearing across its cities, helped along by the lockdown surge in delivery culture, and the popularity of apps such as Glovo, UberEats and Deliveroo.

DUBLIN - Recruited to Ireland with the promise of good wages, fishers from the Philippines - often in debt after paying illegal recruitment fees - travel across the world to provide better opportunities for themselves and their families. But a work permission scheme, introduced following exposure of trafficking and exploitation of undocumented workers in the sector, has now become a vehicle to exploit the same workers it was introduced to protect, according to workers' advocates. 

BRATISLAVA - A couple from Slovakia imported hundreds of frogs from Central America to the EU, completely legally. However, the woman was later apprehended in Germany, where police seized over 100 frogs from her. Some of them of the kind which was never in history imported to Europe legally. Turns out, her husband is a well known person for conservationists in Panama, and for all the wrong reasons.

LATINA - How, through debt, a network of intermediaries linking India to the Pontine countryside keeps thousands of Indian workers under blackmail, exploited in one of the largest fruit and vegetable districts in Europe.