Supported projects

CANARY ISLANDS-SERREKUNDA. Irregular migration from West Africa to the Spanish Canary Islands has risen from 2,700 boat refugees in 2019 to over 23,000 in 2020. This has caused a great deal of social and political concern. 

ANKARA - Turkey has been using its vast presence in Europe and official institutions such as mosques, consulates and institutions in an effort to track its dissidents using covert Turkish intelligence activities.

ROTTERDAM - In the fight against drugs crime in their ports, the mayors of Rotterdam (Aboutaleb) and Antwerp (De Wever), kicked off in 2019 a more intensive collaboration between their ports. The big meeting took place behind closed doors at the Feyenoord Stadium.

THE HAGUE - The Netherlands is an important financial centre behind the international arms trade. Research from The Investigative Desk (the Netherlands) and an Indian news outlet shows how some of the biggest arms companies in the world use the Netherlands as an intermediary to wire profits to tax havens. 

SAMOS - The harrowing conditions in the hotspots of the Greek islands of Lesbos, Samos and Chios have created a mental health crisis. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and self-harm are the most common mental health problems reported by NGOs in the field.

BRUSSELS - As of Wednesday (9 June 2021), the rules for sex work are normalising. After months of vacancy, activity in the zones of tolerance for window prostitution is getting back on track. In the past, sex workers and bar owners have been much investigated, but the property owners are a blind spot. Who are those men and women who buy premises to install display windows where sex workers attract customers? Which companies specialise in real estate for the sex industry and do they have links to foreign countries?

BELGRADE - In this project a cross-border team of journalists sheds a light on how societies in former Yugoslavia deal with the past, by focusing on how war criminals are reintegrated in their home countries: a closer look at the results of international criminal justice.

An in-depth investigation of the We Report network uncovers the dark side of the bottled water business in Europe, where the market is dominated by multinational companies such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé and Danone.

NAIROBI - This story uncovers a multitude of worrying allegations about the unregulated surrogacy industry in Kenya.

Since the start of the nitrogen crisis in 2018, more Dutch livestock farmers moved to Belgium than in previous years. This is evident from new research by Spit and Apache. Environmental organisations have been warning for some time that Belgium has become a 'nitrogen paradise' for large-scale polluters. An inventory of the available data supports this fear.