WHAT WE DO

Lighthouse Reports is a non-profit based in the Netherlands that leads complex transnational investigations blending traditional journalistic methods such as freedom of information requests with emerging techniques like open source intelligence and specialisms like data science.

Our collaborative newsrooms pioneer new formats and pay particular attention to fresh ways of framing complex issues that will capture public attention and challenge misconceptions. We believe investigative journalism helps people navigate complexity, so we create spaces to make this happen.

We follow the journalism code of practice as formulated by The Fourth Estate. It recognizes three core principles that are fundamental to the ethical practice of journalism:

– Reporting the truth

– Ensuring transparency

– Serving the community

CORE TEAM

Daniel Howden Managing director

Daniel is a long-form writer and experienced editor. He has been a foreign correspondent for the Economist, the Guardian and the Independent. He’s a migration expert, Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre and was Senior Editor at Refugees Deeply. Daniel is a two-times winner of the Migration Media Award, won special mention at the inaugural True Stories Award, and finalist at the Online Journalism Awards.

Klaas van Dijken Director

Klaas concentrates on conflict areas and countries with repressive regimes including Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia. His work has been published in media worldwide. He won the Dutch De Tegel award and has been nominated for a Prix Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Reporting in France.

Ludo Hekman Director

Ludo is a journalist and editor. He has worked in print, online and television, reporting from countries including Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. He has helped to pioneer new collaborative investigations into Europe’s arms industry and has a keen sense for the opportunities in emerging technologies. He has won the Citigroup Excellence in Journalism award and has been nominated for several Prix Europa awards.

Charlotte Alfred Senior editor

Charlotte is an editor and investigative journalist working in Europe, the Middle East and the US. She was managing editor of Refugees Deeply, covered international news for HuffPost, and worked on documentaries for PBS Frontline.

Ariadne Papagapitos Impact Editor

Ariadne has 15 years of experience building programmes on conflict resolution, governance and human rights in complex contexts for philanthropic institutions and nonprofits. Prior to joining Lighthouse, she was a consultant to foundations working on forced migration, director of the Peacebuilding program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Co-Founder and New Markets Director at Localized, a startup social enterprise focused on closing the skills and employment gap for young people in developing markets.

Eva Constantaras Data editor

Eva is a data journalist specialized in building data journalism teams in the Global South. She was also a Google News Scholar and is a Fulbright Research Fellow.

Lionel Faull Investigations Editor

Lionel specialises in tracing cross-border money flows behind corruption and mass exploitation. He has more than a decade’s experience as an investigative journalist, previously working for Finance Uncovered in the UK, and the amaBhungane Centre for Investigative Journalism in South Africa.

May Bulman Investigations Editor

May Bulman is an award-winning journalist who specialises in reporting on marginalised groups. She was previously social affairs correspondent for The Independent in the UK, where she gained recognition for her reporting on asylum and migration. During this time she won the Anti-Slavery Day award for Best News piece twice and was shortlisted for the Specialist category in the British Journalism Awards.

Maud Jullien Investigations Editor

Maud was a news correspondent in Senegal and the DRC for seven years before moving to France to become a free-lance documentary film-maker and a news editor-in-chief. She has worked for the BBC, Arte, France 24, TV5 Monde and started collaborating with Lighthouse Reports in 2019, investigating European arms exports. She works in both English and French and has previously written and directed documentaries for the BBC and TV5 Monde.

Crofton Black Senior Reporter

Crofton is a writer and researcher specialising in technology and security topics. His areas of focus include surveillance, military contracting and secret detention. His book Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition (with Edmund Clark, Aperture 2016) won the Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism, as well as forming the basis for several international exhibitions and installations. He has a PhD in the history of philosophy from the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Tomas Statius Investigative Reporter

Tomas Statius is an investigative journalist based in Paris. Most of his work has been focused on migration and the far-right, as well as the defence and security industries. The author of two books, he is a regular contributor to Libération, Mediapart, Le Canard Enchaîné and Disclose, among others. He was the lead investigator on the #MoruroaFiles investigation on the fallout from French nuclear testing in Polynesia.

Margot Gibbs Investigative reporter - Money Trails Specialist

Margot is a UK-based money trails investigator. Previous to Lighthouse she was a reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and Finance Uncovered, where she reported on money flows underpinning corruption, labour and environmental abuse. As a freelancer she investigated corruption in the oil and arms sectors and led investigations for environmental and human rights NGOs.

Thin Lei Win Lead Reporter Food Systems

Thin covers food and climate issues and curates her newsletter Thin Ink. She worked previously as an international correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Born and raised in Myanmar, she’s lived and worked in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and most recently, Italy, and has reported from many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe. In 2015, Thin returned to Myanmar after many years abroad to found and run Myanmar Now, an award-winning bilingual news agency.

Gabriel Geiger Investigative Reporter

Gabriel is a journalist specializing in surveillance and algorithmic accountability reporting. He began collaborating with Lighthouse in 2021 and before that was a regular contributor to VICE Motherboard, where he covered tech, labor, and international news.

Bashar Deeb OSINT investigator

Bashar is an OSINT investigator. Much of his work has centred on different aspects of the refugee experience in Europe. He began working with Lighthouse as part of the EU Arms investigations and has since collaborated with Channel 4 and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. He retains a strong interest in his native Syria and the wider region.

Htet Aung Data Scientist

Htet is a data scientist specialized in machine learning and AI. His previous works focused on building AI models and data analytics dashboards, conducting big data projects, as well as building and mentoring data teams. His current work includes wrangling and analysing data and auditing machine learning models to find leads for further investigations.

Katerina Stavroula Administrator

Katerina is an operations specialist based in Athens. She worked previously at UNHCR, heading donor visibility and donor-related content creation in Greece. Prior to that Katerina worked as a freelance journalist in newspapers and online media and was a contributor to the award-winning Migrants Files, an international data journalism project.

Beatriz Ramalho Da Silva Junior Investigative Reporter

Beatriz is a journalist and researcher with work published in Al-Jazeera English and The Guardian. She was previously studying an Msc in Media Communications and Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During her fellowship she will focus on migration and agriculture and develop her OSINT skills.

Jack Sapoch Junior Osint Investigator

Jack is an OSINT investigator. His previous work has focused on the documentation of human rights abuses against migrants along the Balkan Route, working with grassroots NGOs. He also assisted investigations by Forensic Architecture and ECCHR. He is currently a masters student at Columbia University’s School for International Policy and Affairs.

Halima Salat Barre FBJP Fellow

Halima Salat Barre is a journalist with a strong interest in human rights reporting. She has worked on radio, television and in print, reporting in English, Swahili and Somali. Halima brings a range of reporting experience from Kenya to the Netherlands. She has a particular interest in the intersections between migration and conflict, as well as investigative reporting on issues facing migrant communities in Europe.

Justin Casimir Braun Data Fellow

Justin is a data journalist focused on the societal impact of automated systems and artificial intelligence. In the past, Justin has worked with AlgorithmWatch e.V., a German digital rights organization, and various grassroots NGOs, documenting human rights violations against migrants on the Balkan Route. He holds a bachelor degree in International Relations from Stanford University.

ASSOCIATES

Valentina Azarova

Valentina is an international legal practitioner and academic working at the intersection of law, power and violence. She has lived and worked throughout the Middle East region since 2007, and has 15 years of experience working with inter- and non-governmental organisations and social movements. She is a founding member of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) and teaches practice at various universities. She is also a research fellow at the Manchester International Law Centre, University of Manchester. She regularly advises Lighthouse on various borders, EUarms and labour exploitation investigations since 2019.

Leone Hadavi

Leone is a freelance OSINT analyst and trainer. He is a lead investigator in the EUArms project, an investigator for CIR’s Myanmar Witness and a Bellingcat contributor. His main field of expertise is the export and employment of weapons and relative services in contexts of conflict and internal repression.

Stefano Trevisan

Stefano is a qualified lawyer and open-source investigator. In 2020 he provided continuing legal advice on post-sale services in the European arms industry and contributed to the fact-finding investigation.

SUPERVISORY BOARD

Maria Margaronis

Maria Margaronis is a writer and radio documentary maker, formerly of The Nation, now mostly working for the BBC. She has a special interest in migration and refugee issues, and in Greece and the Balkans. She is currently the chair of the Lighthouse Reports supervisory board, and is also a long-time trustee of the UK-base campaigning charity Women for Refugee Women.

Sarah Stillman

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer with the New Yorker, teacher of literary non-fiction at Yale and head of the Columbia J-School’s Global Migration Project.

Andrew Feinstein

Andrew Feinstein heads the UK-based non profit, Shadow World Investigates and is author of ‘Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade’. He was previously a campaigning MP in his native South Africa.

Tuesday Reitano

Tuesday Reitano is the Deputy Director of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and a senior research advisor at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. She served as a policy specialist in the UN System, including with UNDP, UNDG and the UNODC. She is the co-author of ‘Migrant, Refugee; Smuggler, Saviour’.

Nani Jansen Reventlow

Nani is the founding Director of the Digital Freedom Fund, which supports partners in Europe to advance digital rights through strategic litigation. She is a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School and Adjunct Professor at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. She is an expert in human rights litigation.

Hans Bergwerff

Hans Bergwerff is a specialist advisor on Dutch tax law. Previously founded Bergwerff ten Cate, worked at Loyens & Loeff, BDO and MeesPierson. He is elected Board Treasurer of Lighthouse Reports.

MEDIA PARTNERS

National

Europe

International

PRIZES & NOMINATIONS

#IJ4EU EUROPEAN IMACT AWARD (2022) for Frontex at Fault (winner)
EUROPEAN PRESS PRIZE (2022) for Investigative Reporting for Back Channel Cooperation: How Frontex Helps Haul Migrants Back To Libyan Torture Camps (nomination)
GRIMME PREIS IN GERMANY (2022) for Journalistic Achievement for Europe's Shadow Armies (nomination)
DE TEGEL IN THE NETHERLANDS (2022) for Europe's Shadow Armies (nomination)
DE TEGEL IN THE NETHERLANDS (2022) for Back Channel Cooperation: How Frontex Helps Haul Migrants Back To Libyan Torture Camps (nomination)
ANDERS BORDING PRIZE (2021) for Scandinavian Arms investigation with partners DanWatch (winner)
REPORTER PREIS (2020) in Germany for the joint inestigative story The killing of Muhammad Gulzar on the Greek-Turkish border (nomination)
DANISH METODERPIS AWARD (2020) for the investigation on Scandinavian Arms (nomination)
#IJ4EU IMPACT AWARD (2020) for the investigation Invisible Workers (nomination)