Legislators and government officials have worked to rein in this public health crisis by enacting laws that require food companies to be transparent about their ingredients and limit the advertising of unhealthy foods.

In public, the world’s biggest and richest food companies such as Coca Cola, PepsiCola, and Mondelez say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court to delay, dilute, and derail public health laws, which the companies say violate their rights.

This cross border collaboration with health academics and an international media coalition shed light on how transnational corporations use legal tactics – lawsuits and legal threats – to stymie public health efforts in six countries where such tactics are most apparent: Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, India, Britain, and the United States.

We found:

– 239 lawsuits were filed between 2010 and 2025 across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, and India against public health policies targeting food and beverages such as front of pack labelling, regulating advertising junk food to children, soda taxes, and taxes on ultra processed foods.

– The cases add up to 595 years of litigation, representing a significant burden on the governments defending their health policies.

– Of the cases brought by private companies where the plaintiff was identifiable, more than 1 in 3 came from just nine parent groups, led by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Mondelez

Their actions are not only prolonging the public health crisis but also cost countries billions of dollars in both legal and healthcare costs. In addition, they have a chilling effect on policymakers that wish to better their citizens’ health but do not have the resources to engage in drawn-out legal fights with food companies.

METHODS

We constructed a dataset of challenges to laws aiming to improve population nutrition between 2010 and 2025 in these countries: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, U.S., UK, and India.

With the exception of India, cases were included when a regulation that sought to improve public health through better nutrition was being challenged (i.e. validity, scope, or implementation). We made an exception for cases in India where influencers were being sued, as they were taking over the role of the government in making the nutritional value of products more transparent.

We only included cases that were verifiable through official legal databases, court records, or reputable secondary sources.

We excluded cases solely concerning non-manufacturers such as fresh produce or when companies were appealing fines and other judgments unrelated to public health policies.

This research was done in collaboration with researchers from the University of Caldas (Colombia); Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center (United States); the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil); and the University of Sydney (Australia). They found more lawsuits through a systematic legal search in Colombia, Brazil and Mexico.

An upcoming academic paper will be published alongside the media articles, looking at the dataset from a scientific perspective.

This dataset built on the work and insight of El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico), the FULL database developed by the Global Center for Legal Innovation on Food Environments at the O’Neill Institute and the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, CAJAR (Colombia), and ACT (Brazil).

STORYLINES

– Mexico

More than a third of Mexican schoolchildren and 41% of adolescents were overweight according to a 2022 national survey.

This is the country where we found the most lawsuits (193 out of 239), many of them were against the country’s labelling regulation. Quinto Elemento Lab reveals the companies’ arguments: that the laws were a violation of their constitutional rights and that the measures “demonized” their products or violated consumer rights. For example, a local Pepsi bottler argued that in certain rural areas of Mexico, it was safer to drink soft drinks than the available water. In court, the judges rejected many of the legal arguments that the companies presented.

– Brazil

According to the UN, in 2022-2024, more than 1 in 4 adults in Brazil were living with obesity while nearly 1 in 9 children were overweight.

Some of the 17 lawsuits in Brazil have been dragging on for close to a couple of decades, with no predicted conclusion in sight, according to Agência Pública and O Joio e O Trigo.

In all but one, the plaintiffs were industry associations, which experts told us is a way for companies to keep their valuable brand names away from litigation that may harm their image. Some of the world’s largest food companies are members of these Brazilian associations, including Coca-Cola, Ferrero, Kellogg’s local brand, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, and PepsiCo. 11 of the lawsuits were against the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency, ANVISA, which has been hamstrung as a result. The plaintiffs disputed a regulation that required the advertising of food and beverages with low nutritional value to display more information.

– Colombia

More than half of Colombia’s population is overweight, and treating the diseases caused by unhealthy foods cost the country an estimated 1.3 billion euros in 2021.

We found 18 lawsuits in Colombia, mostly targeting taxes on unhealthy products and front-of-package labelling. Nearly all of them were constitutional challenges brought about by individual citizens as enabled in the country’s constitution. However, Cuestión Pública finds that many of the plaintiffs were lawyers who had done work for food companies. The submissions also used many of the same arguments wielded by the companies. In 2022, while the creation of the health tax was being debated, sugary beverage and ultra-processed food companies donated 5.85 million Euros to political parties, accounting for 40% of all donations to political parties that year.

– U.S.

Two in three adults in the U.S. are overweight and a quarter of adolescents are living with obesity, according to the CDC. The Make America Healthy Again movement supported Trump’s presidency bid.

The American Beverage Association sued to overturn a soda tax in Santa Cruz, which it has so far failed to do. Santa Cruz Local uncovers details of the group’s earlier success squashing a soda tax effort in Watsonville, a neighbouring city. The Santa Cruz lawsuit has far-reaching consequences: the recent victory for the city could unlock the ability for charter cities across California to tax sugary beverages. We found that the soda industry recruited and leveraged the credibility of prominent Black and Latino leaders to amplify opposition against public health taxes within their own communities. We have also identified five other lawsuits. The ABA was involved in four of them.

– Europe

In Europe, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, or cancer are responsible for 80% of the disease burden, according to the European Commission.

Follow The Money discovers that European countries have struggled to pass taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, as they come under industry pressure. Unlike in Latin America, European governments frequently face legal threats before legislation is adopted. Industry groups repeatedly invoke EU state-aid, competition and internal-market rules, creating uncertainty that can delay or derail policies without a single lawsuit being filed. Plans for a joint European sugar tax have also been weakened.

L’Espresso and Il Fatto Alimentare explain the role Italian confectionary giant Ferrero plays around the world in stimying public health laws, and how the family-owned company’s influence both domestically and internationally is connected to the country’s agroindustry rather than its famous cuisine.

– England

As of 2024, 66% of adults and 26% of children in England were either overweight or living with obesity, according to the National Health Service.

In 2021, a year before Kellogg’s sued – and lost – against the country’s nutrient profiling model contained in the Food (Promotion and Placement) (England) Regulations 2021, it sent a pre-action letter to the Department of Health and Social Care, claiming the health rating of its cereals should be measured with the milk it is usually consumed with.

A mere two weeks before the ruling against Kellogg’s, Ferrero and Eat Natural, a subsidiary of Ferrero, also sent pre-action letters over the same regulations.

– India

Nearly one in three Indian women and more than one in four men are overweight or obese. One in five people have high blood sugar levels.

The Wire traces the long journey of India’s front of pack labeling regulation, which the Indian food regulator, the FSSAI, has been developing since 2014. Over that time, it has done numerous consultations, studies but it has stalled regulating, blaming a lack of consensus between the industry and civil society. Research by ATNi commissioned by Lighthouse Reports showed that India’s proposed labelling system is actually consistently more lenient compared to similar systems in Australia and France.

Meanwhile, influential instagram celebrities have made videos comparing the nutrition of various products such as instant noodles, baby food, and others. They’ve been sued by the companies whose ingredient labels they were analysing.

The post Big Food vs. The People appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Their pleas for intervention to preserve traditional French farming may have come far too late.

An investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Le Monde reveals that the forces currently forcing many small-scale French cattle producers out of business were set in motion decades ago, when competition authorities allowed a single industrial group to swallow up its rivals.

Our investigation reveals how competition authorities put French farmers at the mercy of family-owned industrial giant Groupe Bigard, which now slaughters more than one in every three cattle in France.

Thanks to those mergers, one in every five French farmers now faces slaughtering options within a reasonable driving distance that are so dominated by Groupe Bigard that they would generally be considered unlawful under French competition law.

Even if forced to drive further to slaughter cattle, which stresses animals and leads to reduced profits, more than half French farmers face a market which would raise competition concerns.

This loose regulation has paved the way for industrialized agriculture to take over the French cattle industry: farmers were forced to accept huge financial losses, subsidised by the tax payer, whilst Groupe Bigard raised its margins – and consumers paid more for their meat.

Antitrust scholar Professor Peter Carstensen describes such conditions as a “serious structural problem which is going to harm producers for sure”.

According to Austin Frerick, our findings show that the mergers were “devastating for French farmers” . He said they provided “a textbook example of what happens when competition authorities fail to do their jobs. They allowed the market structure to consolidate, squeezing farmers and gouging customers.

“It’s not just the farmers who are losing out here. The Competition Authority’s failure has resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from French taxpayers to a single corporation, Bigard, through subsidies required to cover these losses.”

METHODS

This investigation has endeavoured to understand how a handful of big French slaughterhouse firms, led by Bigard, ended up with so much power, which farms across France are most impacted, whether the concentration of market control is legal — and how this growing power may have harmed farmers.

To measure the changes to market concentration we linked several datasets obtained from the ministry of agriculture by FOI:

• The location, capacity and owners of the slaughterhouses
• The distribution of cattle farms across France, by administrative district
• How Bigard’s slaughterhouses had changed hands over the past 30 years

For each administrative district, we calculated key concentration metrics within three driving time ranges: 1h30, 2h30 and 4h, corresponding to roughly the 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles of travel times for beef cattle in France.

We then evaluated those metrics against thresholds used in competition law in different countries, and showed how those metrics changed due to mergers greenlit by the Competition Authority.

As far as measuring harms to farmers, we sought advice from competition experts. They told us that a hallmark of a company or group of companies being able to exert market power is an increase to the “price spread” – the difference between what supermarkets are charged for products and what farmers are paid. Where that metric increases, it suggests that slaughterhouses are squeezing farmers and gauging consumers.

We were able to obtain figures from France’s Price Observatory which confirmed exactly this trend between 2013 and 2019 – a period when cattle farmers’ losses were reaching their nadir. This analysis was not available for the earlier, pre-merger period, so we used a more approximate measure: the difference between consumer prices and the farmgate prices. They confirmed the same trend: whilst farmer prices were falling, consumer prices were rising.

We were then able to measure how this trend had been active at the corporate level: we analysed Groupe Bigard’s financial statements to measure how the company had benefited from its growing power: not only did the company’s profits increase five-fold between 2004 and 2023, but the main operating company’s profit margins more than doubled; and paid out €300 million in dividends over the last decade.

STORYLINES

Thierry Thil has been farming cattle, pigs, goats and free-range poultry, in the Moselle region, close to France’s borders with Germany and Luxembourg, for thirty years.

He works 70 hour weeks for €900 a month.

But as Bigard’s power has grown, Thierry’s mixed farm has become harder to maintain. As the industry giant acquired more slaughterhouses in the region, it closed some sites and moved others towards slaughtering just one single species – which supports company profits but not producers who maintain mixed farms.

As a result of Bigard’s changes, Thierry now has to take his animals across the border to Luxembourg, which is costly and heavy in administration. It also leaves him vulnerable: as happened last autumn when an outbreak of lumpy skin disease

“It’s stressful taking an animal to the abattoir. You’ve no idea how stressful it is,” says Thierry.

Farmers, seeking an alternative to Bigard, planned to open an abattoir at Thionville, supported by Thil along with around 190 other farmers in the region. It would have been a lifeline. But just as they were supposed to sign the contract, the bank pulled out.

Martine Cordel, then “a very young elected representative on the Chamber of Agriculture” Thierry’s neighbour Martine Cordel was witness to the beginnings of Bigard’s takeover of what were previously farmer-owned abattoirs.

The slaughter industry “put pressure on the [farming] trade to sell its 50 per cent stake in the abattoir, threatening to leave Metz otherwise”, she recounts.

Martine maintains a short supply chain: the family farm sells its produce through short supply chains at L’Ayotte, the first farmers’ market to open in Moselle. She also backed the abattoir at Thionville, believing it would provide farmers like her an essential service. She lost €10,000 when the bank pulled out.

Bigard’s influence extends beyond the slaughterhouses. As Mayor of Autun, Remy Rebeyrotte, championed the re-establishment of the town’s abattoir. It now slaughters cattle from the local area and provides meat for public services and the town’s supermarkets. But Rebeyrotte says he experienced “hostility” about the project from some farmers attached to powerful co-operatives. Some belonged to a cooperative with close links to Bigard. Bernard Joly, former president of the abattoir, is convinced that the fear of Bigard prevented such co-operatives from supporting the abattoir.

Unless the French authority reforms its approach to regulating mergers and supporting sustainable agricultural practices, more and more farmers are going to face the decision about whether to go big or get out.

According to Frerick, the situation would only get worse unless authorities intervene. He said the French Competition Authority should re-evaluate the mergers it approved and implement policy changes to ensure such purchases are not allowed in the future.

According to Anne Witt, a professor of law at the EDHEC Business School, the Competition Authority’s failure to consider the impact on farmers is part of a wider culture in which competition authorities have focused primarily on protecting ‘consumer welfare’ whilst ignoring the broader context of the value chain. “Who cares if a company leaves the market as long as consumer welfare is not affected?”

There is evidence that trends may be shifting.

French competition scholars say the findings reveal issues that go beyond competition policy and merger-control. According to antitrust scholar Professor Walid Chaiehloudj, current competition policy has failed to provide sufficient protections to farmers and regulators should lower the thresholds at which they allow mergers to take place.

But he also suggests more radical reforms: that in order to properly serve the public,competition law should start to actively incorporate higher order objectives like food-sovereignty into its decision making.

The post Cut to the Bone: Farmers at the mercy of the meat monopolists appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Still, little is known about how the UAE co-opts regional governments to achieve its aims in Sudan.

Lighthouse Reports, Evident and Sudan War Monitor travelled to eastern Libya to reveal how the UAE network works on the ground. Through a combination of open source and on-the-ground reporting, the investigation sheds new light on one of the UAE’s most entrenched operations in their vast network of support to the RSF.

As the international community has failed to intervene in Emirati meddling, the UAE has meanwhile built a sprawling network of complex logistics, military bases, financing, and weapons trafficking routes to prop up the Rapid Support Forces and fuel their war efforts in Sudan.

METHODS

The investigations drew on a long term analysis of activity across TikTok, Facebook and Telegram. We reviewed thousands of posts and built an archive of more than 500 relevant clips showing convoy movements between Libya and Sudan, activity at key desert checkpoints and camps, and developments in the border triangle. We verified and connected this material through geolocation, analysis of uniforms, vehicles and other identifying symbols, and social-network analysis of accounts linked to the RSF, the Libyan National Army, and associated networks.

We complimented these efforts with analysis of high resolution commercial satellite imagery of specific sites. Using a custom processing workflow with publicly available Sentinel-2 data., we tracked changes in vehicle routes across remote stretches of the Sahara, helping us understand how smuggling and asset transfers developed in response to changing conditions on the ground. These findings informed reporting trips and interviews.

We worked with ⁨Conflict Insights Group, a public benefit research firm, that conducted analysis of telephones located at Camp 17. CIG used publicly available adtech data, which is information from cookies that users agree to sell to third party vendors when they visit a website or use a mobile application. The information includes movement data, language settings, and other details that users consent to selling to a third party vendor, which CIG purchased. CIG found evidence of at least two South American mercenaries at the site in the summer of 2025. One device located at Camp 17 was set to Colombian Spanish and visited the site from 11-12 June 2025. Another device was set to Argentinian Spanish, and used a military grade phone on 13 aug 2025.

This investigation received kind support from Maltego and IRBIS OSINT-platform.

STORYLINES

Our reporting, including interviews with LNA officers, RSF defectors, and Sudanese military sources, unveiled four previously unidentified RSF camps in Libya, contrary to claims by the RSF that they do not conduct troop training outside of Sudan and contrary to LNA insiders’ claims that the RSF operations in Libya were largely wound down by late 2025.

In Kufra, we embedded with the Libyan National Army in the border triangle area where we had been tracking RSF training and transit sites via social media analysis and heat maps of tracks from suspected RSF resupply convoys throughout the desert for months.

Keen to show us that they were combatting trafficking and had shut down any alleged flow of weapons into Sudan, Lieutenant Enheish Fattah of the LNA’s Subul Al Salaam brigade flatly denied that the LNA facilitated RSF activities in Libya.

“No, that’s all rumors. People are trying to create conflict between the Libyan and Sudanese armies,” Lieutenant Fattah said when questioned on 2025 clashes between the Sudanese Army and the LNA in the border region, in response to increasing frustration of the Sudanese Army and its backers in Egypt about LNA support for the RSF.

Interviews with eight RSF defectors still living in Libya, revealed the full scale of their operations there, which extend from small-scale training activity and transit points in Benghazi to more robust sites in the desert in the border triangle region. These sites include staging sites to prep weapons and modify vehicles for war, training sites where RSF soldiers say they trained alongside the LNA and UAE-contracted Colombian mercenaries, and convoys of trucks carrying fuel and alleged weapons from Libya back into Sudan.

Defectors told us that they were expected to return to Sudan to train their fellow RSF soldiers based on the training they received in Libya.

One defector who agreed to speak on camera to Evident, revealed the location of a previously unknown training camp located approximately 20 kilometers outside of Benghazi.

He described arriving in Libya and being sent to Benghazi through Kufra. Others, he said, were sent to a military camp in Jufra for training. Of his own time at the camp known to him and others in RSF as Camp 17, he told us “there are many here in Camp 17. They are in charge of cars, supplies, and ammo and oversee delivery of them.”

He said the RSF would bring “around 40 or 50, maybe up to 70 or 80” soldiers at a time to train in Camp 17. They would receive their training from LNA soldiers and Colombian contractors.

“RSF is mainly supported by the Emirates,” he told us, adding “but no one can speak up or ask.”

Libyan authorities failed to meaningfully engage with us on the reality of what is happening inside Libya or on their collaboration with the UAE to support the RSF. We traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to interview a spokesman for the RSF government, Tassis, who denied the claims revealed in our reporting.

While the scale of Sudan’s war is almost impossible to account for due to the lack of humanitarian access and the level of violence across the country, recent estimates put the death toll at nearly 400,000 people. Regional analysts insist that the level of support from the Emirates for the RSF has allowed violence, particularly in the Darfur region, to spiral out of control. We interviewed survivors from Khartoum and Darfur in Kufra and in Benghazi to understand the true impact of Emirati meddling on Sudanese civilians. They arrived in Libya after arduous journeys from Sudan – some traveling through Chad – often harassed by RSF soldiers and human smugglers throughout their journey.

“When we reached Libya, we had nothing left,” Fatima, a mother of four living in Kufra told us. “I have nothing left but my children and my honor.”

The post Inside the secret network fueling Sudan’s war appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

It’s a decision that can have huge consequences: a child wrongly assessed to be over can be put into accommodation for adults, often forced to share bedrooms with adults they don’t know, and they can be liable for detention and forced removal.

Last July, the UK Home Office announced that after several years exploring which scientific and technological methods would best assist the age assessment process, it had concluded that the “most cost-effective” option would be to use AI. Last month, the Home Office signed a contract with Cognitec Systems, a Dresden-based facial recognition company, to supply the age estimation algorithm. It announced that the technology would be used by immigration officers at the border from next year to “crack down on fake claims by small boat arrivals posing as children.”

As the UK begins to trial this technology, and as anti-migrant politics become increasingly mainstream across Europe, other countries will be watching to assess if they, too, can use AI to deter migration. It has already been mooted: an EU Parliament briefing published last July floated the possibility of using AI to assess the age of asylum applicants.

This investigation and audit, based on exclusive leaked material from the UK Home Office and technical assessments from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), raises critical questions about whether this type of tech is fit for this new, high-risk purpose.

METHODS

We conducted our own analysis of benchmark data for Cognitec’s system published in April 2026 by NIST, which carries out regular assessments of facial age estimation vendors. Our methodology for analysing the data in the internal Home Office evaluation and the NIST report can be found here.

We were informed by sources of the existence of an internal Home Office evaluation of facial age estimation technology for use on asylum seekers. We requested a copy of the document under Freedom of Information law, but the Home Office refused to disclose it on the basis that it was in the public interest for the department to have a “safe space” to debate the issue “away from external interference and distraction.” We obtained a leaked copy of the report, which tests the technology from seven competing companies.

The UK’s interior ministry disbanded an advisory committee on age assessment days before the AI plans were announced. Two scientists who sat on that committee told us that they had not been consulted about the plans and had grave doubts over the technology. One said he thought the committee had been dissolved in order to prevent them being consulted.

STORYLINES

Our analysis of NIST data revealed that Cognitec’s system misclassified more than two thirds of 16-year-olds as adults when fed photos from the US border, and performed significantly worse on people from African countries. Across all four NIST datasets, the system predicts more than half of 16-year-old West Africans as being over 18, compared with less than a quarter of 16-year-old Eastern Europeans.

The internal Home Office report found that the “best performing” vendor’s FAE technology tended to overestimate the age of teenagers, with 17-year-olds on average predicted to be 18 or over. It also found that it performed worse on female faces.

Crucially, the system described in the report also shows significant bias against Sub-Saharan Africans, with the error rate for this cohort being double that of other groups. This is particularly significant because the top nationalities arriving to the UK on small boats are now Sub-Saharan, and this group also formed the largest group of asylum seekers who had age assessments raised in 2025, according to the Home Office’s own data.

The Home Office report shows that error rates for Sub-Saharan girls are particularly high, at 4.6 years on average, meaning a 14-year-old girl from Sub-Saharan Africa could be predicted to be an adult.

It also notes that many asylum seekers may undergo stress-induced ageing from trauma or travel and that this appears to impact FAE accuracy, although it was unable to systematically test this.

Professor Tim Cole, a former member of the AESAC, the Home Office age assessment committee that was stood down just before ministers announced the use of the age estimation software, said he believed the Home Office dismissed the committee because they didn’t want members to scrutinise the move to AI.

“I suspect [it was] for the reason that we would have been quite damning about it,” said Cole, emeritus professor of medical statistics at UCL’s Institute of Child Health.

The Home Office claimed FAE technology was an “assistive tool” that “does not overrule human judgement”.

Anna Bacciarelli, senior researcher on technology, rights and investigations at Human Rights Watch, said this was of little reassurance given the “well-established phenomenon” of automation bias, whereby people – in this case immigration officers – are prone to trusting a computer’s decision over their own judgment.

She added that the move by the UK set a “dangerous precedent”, saying: “This really is a world-first. If it goes ahead in the UK, other countries at entry points across Europe are likely to follow suit and use of this inaccurate and invasive technology could become widespread.”

The post Asylum by Algorithm appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

But across much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the visa outsourcing giant has become notorious. For people in these regions seeking to travel for work, study or to unite with family, VFS is often their first encounter with the border. And for many, this entails not only the stress and uncertainty of restrictive visa regimes, but also being compelled to hand over cash for what should be optional services — sales that have become central to the VFS Global’s growth.

Since its founding in 2001, VFS has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company whose owners include a major donor to Donald Trump and Dubai’s ruling family. It now holds visa outsourcing contracts with 71 governments worldwide. While applicants are charged a mandatory service fee, VFS has built an adjacent business around selling add-ons such as SMS updates, courier return services and access to premium lounges.

A year-long investigation by Lighthouse Reports, in collaboration with 14 media outlets, has found that VFS has created a system of aggressive – and at times dishonest – upselling. Staff are typically paid low base salaries and awarded bonuses contingent on meeting monthly sales targets for value added services, creating perverse incentives to sell.

Sales of these services have been key to the company’s growing profitability, which has increased fourfold in recent years, and have helped drive huge profits for its investors, our analysis shows.

We also found evidence that customers are exposed to bribery at the hands of both external agents and sometimes VFS staff, as well as repeated mishandling of personal data, amounting to what experts described as “manifestly serious violations of the GDPR”. Internal documents show that contracting governments know about these violations, but rarely take robust action.

Drawing on hundreds of internal EU documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests, as well as financial statements, analysis of customer receipts and interviews with dozens of former VFS employees, this investigation reveals how governments have offloaded a core state function to a company that treats would-be would-be workers, students and tourists as a captive market to be exploited.

VFS said that “any suggestion that VFS Global’s financial growth has been generated through improper conduct is false”.

METHODS

EU member states are required under EU law to closely and regularly monitor outsourced visa service providers such as VFS. Through Freedom of Information requests we obtained inspection and monitoring reports of visa service providers by 22 countries from the EU’s Schengen free-travel zone that have contracts with VFS, as well as dozens of EU documents evaluating member states’ application of the Schengen laws, including the outsourcing of visa processing to companies including VFS. We obtained leaked reports from the European Commission’s own diplomatic service which revealed EU governments are aware of consistent deficiencies in VFS’s service. Diplomatic sources confirmed they were aware of these problems.

We interviewed dozens of current and former VFS staff across several countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East to gain insight into the company’s sales practices that push applicants to buy value added services. They told us workers are typically paid low base salaries, with bonuses tied to meeting monthly targets for sales of additional services, creating huge pressure to meet these targets.

By analysing financial statements of VFS and its subsidiaries around the world we were able to understand the role of value added service to the business. Its consolidated financial statements in Luxembourg showed that its revenues increased out of proportion to the number of visa applications it processed, that its profits had increased fourfold between 2017 and 2024, and that the company consistently attributed its profitability, and its future growth, to sales of value added services. Accounts from a subsidiary in India showed that its value added services business in the country made pre-tax margins of up to 70%.

We visited numerous VFS visa centres and used social media forums to speak to visa applicants who told us about their experiences dealing with VFS. Dozens of them told us they were pushed, misled or left with little practical choice but to pay extra fees to the company.

By submitting FOI requests to Swedish embassies, we obtained more than 2,000 receipts for applications made from 16 countries in Asia and Africa over a two-week period in 2025. We used machine reading to establish that value added services account for 30% of VFS’s revenue in the sample.

We obtained evidence of bribery in the form of undercover footage revealing a VFS staff member in the DRC claiming to guarantee visas in exchange for a payment higher than the normal fee.

STORYLINES

Vrinda was exhausted by the time she reached VFS’s office in Pune, India, last June after waiting for a taxi in torrential rain and traveling an hour in traffic. The 71-year-old was applying for a visa to visit her son in Belgium and meet her new granddaughter. Thankfully she was only 15 minutes late for her appointment.

“I explained the situation with the rain, and told [the visa officer] I had problems with my back,” recalls Vrinda, who uses a walking stick.

But the VFS officer told her she had two choices: Go home and book another appointment, or pay the equivalent of €35 for the company’s premium service — roughly the cost of what Vrinda pays for a month’s worth of groceries.

“They said no, you can come back another day or pay. I was quite shocked,” she said. “But whatever they told me, I had to follow.”

Vrinda’s experience is far from unique: she is one of myriad visa applicants who told us they were hit with unexpected fees during their visit to VFS Global.

And it’s not only applicants who have told us VFS pushes people to buy expensive ‘premium’ services. Current and former VFS employees told us they were typically paid low base salaries, with bonuses tied to meeting monthly targets for sales of what should be optional add-ons such as access to premium lounges and SMS updates – and described feeling pressured to meet these targets.

Former staff in several countries told us that they put such added value services onto customers’ bills without their consent. “Most customers would just accept this,” said one ex-employee who worked for VFS in Kenya until 2024.

A visa officer currently working at VFS in Nigeria said the bonuses for selling value added services could amount to almost twice the base salaries of contractors. He said contractors make up the majority of the VFS workforce and earn about €126 a month. The result, he explained, is constant pressure to sell.

“There is always a need to sell value-added services,” he said. “You have to be persistent in making sure the applicant sees reasons to buy them.”

Rohit Taneja, who worked as a visa operations officer at VFS’s Delhi center between 2016 and 2017, said: “We had targets on SMS and courier [numbers]. We had to pitch, try to convince, even if the applicant said no. People think that we are from the embassy and whatever we are saying is right — especially those visiting for the first time. So, we got very few denials.”

Some applicants have taken matters into their own hands. One online petition states that VFS has built a ‘digital wall’ and has become a “monopoly service provider” for the Schengen area that “lacks basic accountability” and has “no incentive to fix broken systems”.

Joyce José, the Angolan-British national who launched the petition, is determined in her demand for change, telling us: “We’ll keep pushing because those of us who have to deal with VFS are demanding a permanent systemic fix rather than one-off resolutions.”

Full statement of VFS

The post The Visa Empire: Borders as a Business appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The world’s largest food companies say they want to be part of the solution. But behind closed doors, they are lobbying governments to derail public health laws.

Our series of investigations, with partners on five continents, reveals the global lobbying tactics of food corporations. We are starting this project’s publication with one country, Colombia, where companies producing unhealthy food attempt to influence the May 2026 presidential elections.

In Colombia, more than half of the population is overweight, with tremendous human and economic costs. Treating the diseases caused by unhealthy foods cost Colombia an estimated 1.3 billion euros in 2021. To address this crisis, civil society and members of the congress proposed various policies. In 2022, they pushed a bill to establish a tax on ultra-processed food, including sodas.

Food companies vigorously lobbied against the bill. Our investigation with Cuestión Pública reveals that companies paid for 40% of all donations to political parties that year, adding up to over 5.85 million Euros.

One of the recipients of the donations from food companies was Paloma Valencia, one of the top candidates in the ongoing presidential elections, which begins May 31. She has promised to eliminate the tax if she’s elected president.

Despite the opposition, the tax passed, and it worked: the consumption of unhealthy foods and sugary drinks dropped dramatically. Lawyers, however, moved to the courtroom. 17 legal challenges were filed against the public health measures. Most of the challenges were made by individuals, under a process that enables any Colombian citizen to challenge the constitutionality of laws or policies. So far, they have all been rejected.

METHODS

In order to find who was pushing back against the public health laws, we did a comprehensive search on legal databases and interviews for all legal challenges to the laws. We also obtained and analysed thousands of social media posts to look for the positions of presidential candidates on food policies. We also searched external visits to members of the Congress by people working for or on behalf of food companies.

STORYLINES

The pushback by the ultra-processed food lobby happened behind closed doors. The names of food companies didn’t appear in the court documents, but most of the individuals who filed legal challenges were lawyers who had done work for food companies. Their submissions also used many of the same arguments wielded by the companies against the tax. Three of the legal challenges were filed by a lawyer, Juan Manuel Charry Urueña, who skirted around our question when we asked who paid for this work. In his email to file the constitutional challenge, he copied a major regional manufacturer of sodas. When Cuestión Pública asked him why he copied them, he told the outlet that he was in a conversation with the group because their products were being unfairly taxed at a higher rate. Four of the other legal challenges came from a law firm and three from a former senator.

Unhealthy food has a tremendous impact in Colombia, leading to billions of euros in health costs and human suffering. Cuestión Pública interviewed the parents of children and infants who had serious health complications that specialists attributed to their diet composed of ultra-processed food. Those also contribute to diabetes and a host of related diseases.

The post Big Food vs The People – Colombia appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

Sudan has been torn apart by war since April 2023, when a power struggle between two generals – the head of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the leader of the RSF – devolved into a war. There is no end in sight after many rounds of failed peace talks and the involvement of proxy actors fueling the fight. Over three years into Sudan’s brutal war, the true scale of significant battles and attacks on civilians, including the siege of El Fasher, remain unknown.

When the city fell into the hands of the RSF at the end of October 2025, the RSF killed thousands and potentially tens of thousands of people in a matter of days. It became one of the biggest massacres in the three year old civil war. Yet, little is known of what happened inside the city before and after the take over, how the massacre unfolded and what survivors experienced.

For this investigation we travelled to Uganda where the protagonists of the film fled after they escaped from El Fasher at various points through the siege. Their stories paint the picture of life in a besieged city: at first bombardment and civilians caught in the crossfire and then a deepening and strategic effort by the Rapid Support Forces to pen civilians in, trapped in their own city. The pacing of the documentary mirrors the slow encircling of the city as the RSF built a berm to prevent medical supplies and food from entering the city, an effort to pressure the Army and civilians left inside and a means to control the flow of civilians attempting to flee.

The survivors interviewed by Lighthouse Reports, Fault Lines, and Sudan War Monitor tell harrowing stories of limited options: stay inside the city and starve or risk traveling over the RSF-berm encircling the entire city and face possible extortion, harassment or worse, execution. The story of one survivor and her daughter lays bare tactics including the widespread use of rape as a tool of war by the RSF in El Fasher and across Darfur. The story of another mother missing her son delves into the widespread use of abduction and detention wielded by the RSF in El Fasher. Their testimonies are confirmed by work from Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders who operated clinics across Darfur and investigated the scale of the use of rape against women and girls in Darfur.

While the true death toll might never be known, there are some clues that reveal the scale of the killings. We gathered the IDs of over one hundred Sudanese people who were killed as they tried to escape EL Fasher, through sensitive reporting with sources including body collectors who were made to bury the dead after the fall of the city. Many of the documents were splattered with blood. Among the deaths are men, women and children as young as four.

METHODS

For the film and the story in Sudan War Monitor, we interviewed survivors, eye witnesses and RSF-insiders who were present during the siege of El Fasher. They told us, among other things, how the berm that the RSF had built, kept them inside the city.

We mapped the construction of the berm around El Fasher by reviewing hundreds of satellite images captured between April and October 2025, using Planet Labs imagery, Sentinel-2 data, and high resolution imagery from Vantor.

By comparing successive images in QGIS, we were able track the sequence of construction with an estimated accuracy of a few days. In some images, active construction activity was also directly visible at the moment of capture, including excavators and other earthmoving activity. The mapped timeline was then animated using Blender to show the berm’s expansion over time.

STORYLINES

The reporting and documentary style is an effort to connect to the human cost of the RSF siege on El Fasher and the humanity of Sudanese civilians who lived through a brutal 18 month siege and the three-day nightmarish fall of the city in October 2026.

Ruqaya Jaber was born and raised in El Fasher and she fled the city on foot in late October, as the city fell to the RSF. Now living with several other women at Kiryandongo refugee settlement in Uganda, Ruqaya tells Lighthouse Reports and Fault Lines how she lost 12 members of her family and is still searching for her son, who was abducted by the RSF. She remembers the berm that encircled and starved her city and the fear of realising there might be no way out.

Halima Abdalla fled El Fasher with her four children one year before the city fell and after a brutal RSF attack on her family. Her then-seven-year-old daughter was raped by RSF soldier as her elder daughter tried to intervene. Her daughter is one of over 3,000 girls and women who were raped in Darfur during the course of the war. Still deeply traumatized by what her daughter and family experienced, she insisted on telling her story despite fear of retribution.

Abulgasam Sajw is a young citizen journalist who spent years documenting the RSF assault on the displacement camp he grew up in and in El Fasher.

Hadia Hasballah is a psychologist and counselor from Khartoum who fled several months into the war, her large family scattered in several countries. She established a women’s center in Kampala to support Sudanese women, continue the fight of the 2019 revolution, and support refugees. She leads sessions to help women from across Sudan process their trauma and hopes to go back to Sudan in order to finish the work of the revolution.

The post No Exit from El Fasher appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

The incoming president, William Ruto, promised that the new Social Health Authority (SHA) would bring affordable healthcare to all. In reality, Kenyans took to social media in shock and anger over the cost of insurance that the AI model was setting for them.

The AI system asks dozens of questions about how people live and what they own, then uses machine learning to make a prediction of their income based on their answers. A percentage of this predicted income is then set as their annual health payment.

We used a combination of access-to-information requests and government data to reconstruct how the government designed the prediction system, spoke to inside sources about its implementation, and obtained a previously unreported document describing where it went wrong. Our findings reveal in unprecedented detail how, from the start, it was designed to systematically overcharge the poorest Kenyans, while undercharging the wealthiest.

Increasingly, governments around the world are deploying AI in efforts to increase revenue and efficiency. Those implementing them understand that they come with inbuilt biases. In the context of access to healthcare, these biases can mean the difference between life or death.

METHODS

SHA’s AI system uses a machine learning model to analyse indicators (the answers to questions about how people live) and make a prediction of their income, based on a training dataset in the form of a household survey carried out in 2020. The government published the formula it would use for making the prediction, but not the details of the indicators or the training set. We made access to information requests for these. Under pressure from the Ombudsman, SHA released these details, which we used to build our own machine learning model to replicate and test their one.

We also uncovered a previously unseen report by a team of consultants who proposed a set of adjustments to the system. We refined our model to implement these changes and test what effects they had.

Our replication of SHA’s model was peer reviewed by leading academics at the University of Kent, Georgetown University and Delft University of Technology. We have written a full methodology here.

STORYLINES

Every day, Grace* sits in people’s homes and asks them questions. What type of toilet do you use? What is your roof made of? Do you own a radio? She helps them fill the answers into an online form. When the process is complete a number comes back: the sum the AI system dictates the household must pay that year for public health insurance.

Grace is a Community Health Promoter, working with marginalised people to help them access healthcare. The people she registers are some of the poorest in Nairobi, yet the majority are charged premiums they cannot afford. For some, this has meant they can no longer access life-saving medical treatment. “People are dying at home, many people have been unable to go to hospital,” Grace said. “Will they pay SHA, or pay for food, or pay for the small house they live in?”

Peris Nduta faces the same choice. Until last year she scratched a living as a mama fua, washing other people’s clothes. But when a fall left her with a broken leg needing metal pins, she found she could no longer work. The AI system set a premium for her that she couldn’t understand. Friends helped her make an initial payment but, now jobless, she could not maintain it to cover ongoing treatment and medication. “The priority is for my children to eat,” she said, “not to pay for SHA.”

In Huruma, a poor neighborhood on the northeastern outskirts of Nairobi, Africa Uncensored spoke to Florence Atieno about how she had struggled to pay the SHA premium when pregnant. She hoped that the automated appeal line could help her reduce her burden. But it was denied, without a reason given.

The post Hiding Behind AI appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

In an official statement, Mayotte’s police claimed the small boat’s pilots had “deliberately rammed” the police vessel. The two kwassa pilots were sentenced to three years in prison.

But a video and police testimony obtained by Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and Komune raise serious doubts about the official account.

The 30-second segment, filmed by a police officer, shows their boat closing in until it is directly alongside the kwassa. A passenger appears to throw a stone. An officer then uses a hooked pole to try to tear away a fuel line from one of the engines. At that exact moment, one of the two pilots (wearing a red shirt in the video) is seen releasing the helm.

The kwassa abruptly loses speed, spins and slides under the police boat. A flashlight beam cuts through the darkness. Passengers are already in the water as the vessel goes down. An officer shouts: “Shit – overboard, overboard!”

During the investigation, a policeman said their use of the hook was what caused a pilot to let go of the helm: “I was approaching, and to avoid the hook, the helmsman who was on the right-hand side of the boat let go of the 75-horsepower engine, causing their boat to veer sharply towards us”, he said, “their boat started taking on water, the passengers panicked and all went to the same side, which caused the boat to capsize.”

An officer stated that while he was trying to rescue a four-year-old girl, a passenger used the girl for leverage to climb aboard and he saw her eyes ‘roll back.’ She was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Earlier this week, the prosecutor of Mayotte confirmed she was out of danger.

The incident is part of a broader pattern. In September 2025, we revealed that French authorities in Mayotte routinely used aggressive interception tactics such as collisions, encirclement and wave generation despite the absence of any formal doctrine permitting these practices. We found that multiple shipwrecks and at least 25 deaths, including one as recently as March, have resulted from these interceptions, highlighting the risks.

METHODS

We obtained and analysed previously unseen footage filmed by a police officer. We cross-checked the footage against judicial hearings including police accounts to identify inconsistencies. In parallel, we interviewed lawyers and survivors to gather accounts of the interceptions. We also spoke to experts and police officers who provided technical assessments of the tactics used at sea.

STORYLINES

A month after the incident visible on the video we obtained, on March 28, 2026, a similar interception took place. This time it ended with the death of a passenger.

Officers say the kwassa’s pilot refused to stop and endangered those on board. They describe attempting to stop the engine by disconnecting the fuel line. They claim the pilot then made a sharp 90-degree turn into their path, causing the collision. The small boat took on water and capsized.

Among those thrown into the sea were three children, including a nine-month-old baby, five women and a 73-year-old man. Twenty-four people were rescued. Hidaya B., a woman in her fifties from Anjouan in Comoros, suffered head injuries and could not be revived.

Survivors interviewed, now held in a detention centre in Mayotte, blame the police’s maneuvers. “The police capsized our boat,” said Farid S., who alleges the victim’s head was crushed by the interceptor’s engine.

“They overturned us,” said another passenger, Ahmed S., 21.

A third survivor, Anzidine M., described officers “hitting the pilot on the arms with metal poles” and crashing into the kwassa before “driving straight over it”, adding: “There was blood everywhere.” Eleven passengers have filed civil complaints, according to their lawyer, Céline Cooper.

Responding to our questions, the Prosecutor of Mayotte said an investigation had been opened against the smugglers for aggravated manslaughter and aggravated aiding and abetting of immigration.

The Police meanwhile declined to answer our questions, but five officers were decorated for their intervention on March 28th. “Faced with the absolute emergency of shipwreck victims unable to swim,” officials stated, “the crew members of the interceptor showed exemplary courage by immediately jumping in to assist the victims and deploying rescue equipment.”

The post Caught on camera : French police cause capsize appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.

But in Tennessee, where Republicans hold a supermajority in both state legislative chambers, many elected officials have welcomed ICE with open arms. GOP Gov. Bill Lee and other state leaders have actively paired state police with ICE agents, offering the federal agency a powerful force multiplier.

In May, a week-long enforcement effort dubbed “Operation Flood the Zone” that teamed Tennessee Highway Patrol with ICE on the streets of Nashville, signaled a new level of cooperation between state leaders and the Trump administration. Nine months after the state and federal operation, Nashville residents are still searching for answers about who was taken and deported, and the role that Tennessee played in targeting residents.

In the wake of the Nashville operation, state and federal officials turned their sights on Memphis, launching the “Memphis Safe Task Force.” More than 1,500 federal agents are still working alongside hundreds of state troopers and the National Guard. City leaders and residents in both Nashville and Memphis say they have received little information from the state or the White House about these collaborations.

Lighthouse Reports in partnership with Mother Jones, the Nashville Banner, Nashville Noticias, NewsChannel 5 and the Institute for Public Service Reporting spent six months collecting and analyzing data, including thousands of pages of ICE documents, hundreds of criminal court records and Tennessee Highway Patrol incident reports. We also examined 50-plus hours of Tennessee Highway Patrol dashcam and bodycam footage. We found that 75 percent of those detained in Nashville had no criminal record, and that state troopers and ICE appeared to racially profile Latino drivers. Troopers chose to ignore traffic violations to continue helping ICE, and they targeted neighborhoods with the largest number of Latino and immigrant families. For the first time, using a vast federal database, the investigation was also able to track those targeted, from their arrests on the street through the immigration detention system and onto deportation planes. Then, when federal and state officials moved their operation from Nashville to Memphis, we followed them, analyzing hundreds of pages of arrest affidavits to find that dangerous high-speed chases, initiated by state troopers deployed to the city to work alongside ICE, increased by more than 400 percent during the first five weeks of the “Memphis Safe Task Force.”

METHODS

To determine who was arrested during the May 2025 Nashville operation, we dug into more than a million ICE records released by the Deportation Data Project. The data trove contains anonymized individual-level ICE records covering arrests, detainers, and detentions from September 2023 to October 2025, in addition to encounters and removals data from September 2023 to July 2025.

By combining these data with bystander video, interviews, police dashcam and bodycam footage, and highway patrol incident reports, we reconstructed the anatomy of the operation carried out by ICE and Tennessee Highway Patrol. This allowed us to follow people through the deportation pipeline from arrest to deportation.

By analyzing bystander video, police video, and geocoordinates in Highway Patrol incident reports we were able to map the areas of Nashville targeted by state troopers and ICE.

Additionally, in Memphis we reviewed hundreds of arrest affidavits filed over the first five weeks of the Memphis Safe Task Force from September 29 to November 3. By isolating “evading arrest” charges we identified 75 separate vehicle pursuits.

STORYLINES

During a Nashville press conference, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said of the people arrested: “All of these criminals are evil, they’re horrible human beings, they’re the worst of the worst.” In reality, 75 percent of those detained had never committed a crime, and some were in the process of becoming legal U.S. residents.

Leugim Romero was on his way home after working a late shift when he was stopped by THP and ICE. From Venezuela, Romero had filed for asylum and was in the U.S. legally. Examining the police video, we discovered that ICE accused Romero of being part of the gang Tren de Aragua because he had tattoos. Romero has since been deported to Venezuela.

Tennessee Highway Patrol officers used traffic stop pretexts such as bent license plates, unlit temporary tags, and dark window tints to pull people over, so that ICE, which can’t make routine traffic stops, could check their immigration status—and bypass constitutional and legal protections. During the stops, some ICE agents were masked and carried assault rifles and “window punches,” in case drivers refused to roll down their windows.

In Nashville, the majority of people arrested and deported were Latino. Troopers and ICE agents appeared to racially profile drivers during the operation. “This might fill us up,” says a state trooper to an ICE agent in his squad car. “They’re definitely not English speakers.” Records also show that the traffic stops resulted in few criminal or traffic law enforcement actions, despite Tennessee officials and ICE claiming the enforcement was for public safety and to arrest the “worst of the worst.”

Elsewhere in Tennessee, during the first five weeks of the Memphis Safe Task Force operation, dangerous high-speed pursuits initiated by Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers increased by 400 percent. Troopers sent to Memphis are working alongside ICE and other federal agents. In one case, a pursuit lasted for a quarter-hour, as troopers at high speeds pursued a blue Chevy Malibu with a woman and infant inside. The vehicle struck a trooper’s squad car, then a telephone pole. The pursuit was initiated because the driver had “failed to dim his bright lights.”

The post License to Profile appeared first on Lighthouse Reports.