Ruth Hopkins

Ruth worked as a journalist and editor with the Wits Justice Project in Johannesburg from 2012 to 2018, producing content about wrongful convictions, lengthy remand detention, police brutality and various other criminal justice issues.

She wrote a book on trafficking women into Europe, which was published in 2005 (Ik laat je nooit meer gaan, I will never let you go again), based on five years of research in Albania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and the Netherlands.

With an LLM in International Law and Human Rights, Ruth has also explored other areas of work. In addition to her journalistic work, she set up and taught a human rights course at a journalism college in the Netherlands.

Ruth, who grew up in the Netherlands and is of British/Irish descent, has written an as of yet unpublished novel about ‘Magdalene women’ who were incarcerated in convents in Ireland because they were perceived as a ‘moral danger to society’.

In 2013 she broke an international story on private security company G4S’ South African prison. Her non-fiction narrative book on the prison, Misery Merchants (Life and Death in a Private South African Prison), was published in February 2020.

Since 2016, Ruth has worked with IF Productions, a Dutch documentary film production company, on a documentary film based on the same investigation. It premiered in November 2019 to acclaim at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.