In this image, taken September 16, 2018, people raise their mobile phone lights during a monthly vigil and protest calling for justice in the case of Daphne Caruana Galizia. Daphne was a leading investigative journalist who courageously exposed corruption and criminal behaviour at the highest levels of government in Malta. She was assassinated with a car bomb on October 16, 2017, not far from her home. Shortly after, three men were charged with carrying out her murder. A year after the charges, investigators announced they had identified the alleged masterminds, but as of early December 2018, have still not released their names. Activism around Daphne’s death continues to drive the movement against corruption and for transparency forward.

Malta-born photojournalist Darrin Zammit Lupi is a widely-published contract photographer with Reuters. His book Isle Landers, documenting the plight and tragedy of migrants trying to reach European shores from Africa, was published in 2014. As a Reuters photographer in Malta, he has been closely involved in The Daphne Project.

Dayvi *, lives in Chennai in South India. She sold her kidney in 2016 for about 1 lakh rupees (US$1,400); her kidney was later sold on the black market. She was flown to a surgical centre in Sri Lanka where it was cheaper to remove her kidney. Dayvi has not seen a doctor since the operation, and three years later she is in constant pain and cannot work or lift heavy weights.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, around the world, an organ is sold every hour, and kidneys comprise an estimated 75% of the black market in human organs and an estimated 5-10% of all kidney transplants. In India alone, 150,000-200,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant, but less than 4% ultimately receive one. South Asia is the centre of black market organ transplants, where more than 2,000 Indians sell their kidneys annually. Kidney donors – especially those in developing countries – often do so out of desperation and extreme poverty. While kidney donation can be done safely, many donors in the black market are not treated according to best practices. Reports by the WHO show that black market donors have lower survival rates, and the majority of donors live with ongoing complications that negatively impact their day-to-day lives.

In 2019, Mariam* was deceived, trafficked, and repeatedly raped in a “baby factory” in Nigeria when she was 16 years old.

Mariam and her cousin were living in the Madinatu Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in northeastern Nigeria after the terrorist group Boko Haram attacked and destroyed their village in 2017. The IDP camp was reportedly poorly equipped, lacking sufficient food and supplies for camp residents. Desperate for money, the girls accepted jobs offered by a stranger they met outside the camp gates, who promised them well-paid domestic work in a distant city.  Instead, they were brought to a heavily guarded compound in a different city, where the cousins were immediately separated and brutally raped. The girls – along with dozens of others – were exploited as sex slaves, repeatedly raped by several men on a near-daily basis. When the girls became pregnant and gave birth, their traffickers took their their babies and then released the girls from captivity.

The boom in illicit baby factories run by criminal networks is a growing problem in Nigeria and is now the third most common crime in the country.  The proliferation of baby factories is linked to the increase in demand for infant adoptions in the country over the past 20 years. Infants stolen from trafficked women and girls in captivity are typically sold by their traffickers to childless couples seeking to adopt. The baby factories often masquerade as orphanages, social welfare homes, and maternity clinics, making detection difficult and accurate data on the scale of the crime nearly impossible to gather. Those operating the baby factories often receive backing and protection from prominent and powerful allies. In 2020 alone, Nigerian police rescued 57 women, girls, and infants being held in baby factories. The growth of baby factories contributes to Nigeria’s significant human trafficking problem, which is estimated to impact between 750,000 and 1 million people who are trafficked for forced labour or sexual exploitation each year.

* Name has been changed.