A new report on migration shows that many of the bodies of migrants that drowned between January 2015 and June 2016 in the Mediterranean were never identified, and families at home face never finding out what happened to their loved ones.
The report: Missing Migrants in the Mediterranean: Addressing the Humanitarian Crisis, shows that in 2015 and the first half of 2016, over 6,600 refugees and migrants drowned or went missing in the Mediterranean after their boats capsized while trying to reach Europe. And the crisis is ongoing.
The report was authored by the University of York, City University London and the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM’s) Global Migration Data Analysis Centre in Berlin.
“Behind the visible catastrophe of shipwrecks and deaths in the Mediterranean is an invisible catastrophe in which bodies are found and not enough is done to identify them and inform their families,” said Dr. Simon Robins, lead author of the report and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York, according to the website of the IOM.
“This is devastating for their families back home. They likened it to a form of torture where they are caught between hope and despair, not knowing whether they would ever see their loved one again, not knowing if they should give up hope and focus on the rest of their lives,” said Dr Robins.
“More than anything these people want to know if their loved one is alive or dead. If they are dead, they want to bring their relative home and have them buried visibly in their community.”
The IOM says the report details the findings of the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded Mediterranean Missing Project, which was launched as part of a wider 1 million pounds sterling ESRC research programme, in response to the on-going humanitarian crisis.
It said over a period of 12 months, a team of researchers worked on the Greek island of Lesbos and in Sicily, Italy – the two main entry points for migrants and refugees into Europe and where a large number of boats carrying migrants have sunk in recent years – and looked at how the authorities deal with the bodies of migrants.
“They interviewed a range of relevant actors, including local authority employees, NGOs, coastguards, coroners, and funeral office staff, as well as families of missing migrants from Tunisia, Syria and Iraq, to understand their experience.
“What they found was shocking. The number of both arriving migrants and of deaths has overwhelmed local authorities with limited resources – notably in Greece, which has been devastated by the economic crisis.”
It said as a result, efforts to determine the identities of dead migrants have been insufficient. “Official investigations were limited and often flawed. Personal effects of refugees found on the beaches were not systematically collected or stored to support identification, and survivors of shipwrecks were not systematically interviewed about those who had died.”
There are also problems in the management of data from bodies. In Italy, for example, every region stores data independently. In Greece, even though DNA samples are taken from dead bodies and stored centrally, there is no way of linking most bodies buried in a Lesbos graveyard to a DNA sample held in Athens, because until recently bodies have not been consistently labeled.
“Under international human rights law, all states have an obligation to investigate any suspicious death,” said Dr. Robins. “However, we found that in many instances migrant deaths were not being investigated.”
The report found that the main problem identified by the researchers in their report is a lack of coherent and coordinated policy concerning deceased migrants in both Greece and Italy. “The policy vacuum at the national level means that local municipalities and authorities are overwhelmed and are not provided with the capacity or financial resources to deal with the nature and volume of the humanitarian crisis.”
It noted that there are a large number of agencies with overlapping mandates that fail to coordinate with one another, leading to no one being sure who is responsible for what. The different state and local agencies involved have little support from national governments or from the EU, it said.
