Investigations

A Story of Cover-ups and Corporate Neglect

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When private companies assume control over people’s lives and build their business on managing them, they carry a heightened responsibility to ensure that their operations are conducted with integrity and care. This obligation is especially pressing for Allied Universal, the world’s largest private security company, which in 2021 acquired G4S, a firm already implicated in several serious human rights violations. The Another Dead Prisoner project casts a stark light on conditions inside the G4S-run Mangaung Correctional Facility in South Africa. It was here that Danish citizen Peter Frederiksen lost his life in 2024. Multiple inmates have alleged that Frederiksen was subjected to violent treatment by staff, including electric shocks from the guard’s electrified shields.

Investigations

Another Dead Prisoner

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Photograph: Ruth Hopkins

The cross-border investigation, Another Dead Prisoner, sheds light on grim human rights violations by the worlds biggest private security company in the South African prison Mangaung Correction Facility. The investigation has been carried out as a collaboration between Ruth Hopkins, Onderzoekscollectief spit, Glynnis Marriday and Nicoline Noe, Investigative Reporting Denmark. The investigation is supported by IJ4EU. Team-members

A Story of Cover-ups and Corporate Neglect

Stories

September 23, 2025

SABC News, Cutting Edge (South Africa): Mangaung Prison: Death behind bars

The investigation is still ongoing. More publications are planned.

Investigations

Team-members in Another Dead Prisoner

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Ruth Hopkins, Netherlands/the UK, freelance journalist and member of onderzoekscollectief Spit in the Netherlands. She is the founding editor of the Private Security Network, a transnational network of investigative journalists. Ruth Hopkins has worked as a journalist and editor with the Wits Justice Project in Johannesburg from 2012 to 2018. In 2016 she was awarded the Sylvester Stein fellowship. She is the author of Misery Merchants (2023), on a private prison and I’ll never let you go again (2005) on trafficking of women into Europe.

Investigations

Complexity: An Important Lesson Learned

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Flooding, like climate change itself, is deeply complex. It involves a vast web of actors, overlapping initiatives, and an ever-expanding body of legislation. 

At the outset of our investigation, we imagined we could uncover negligence simply by sending out a wave of FOI and EIR requests and identifying those who had failed in their responsibilities. But what we uncovered was more complicated. The problem is not simply negligence; it is disjointedness – and can better be described as a fragmented response, leaving gaps between some initiatives. 

Although climate change touches every corner of Europe, its consequences are uneven. Each landscape carries its own vulnerabilities, and floods take on different forms depending on terrain, climate, and history.