The data presented below is the result of exhaustive monitoring carried out 365 days a year by our Collective within the framework of our Border Rights Observatory. Migrant communities, rescue services, family networks and human rights defenders on the ground collect, compare and systematise necessary information.
Loss of life on migration routes has become normalised in the discourse of migration control, resulting in a rise in the number of victims and the use of increasingly deadly repression against migrant communities.
During the first half of 2022 covered in this report, there has been an escalation in the militarisation of migration control, with measures that represent a systematic attack on migrants’ human rights.
This situation has been exacerbated by the belligerent discourse surrounding the war in Ukraine and the rearmament envisaged by Europe and NATO is also likely to affect border control management. In the Spanish State’s political narrative, people on the move have been positioned as one of various threats from the Global South and subjected to a de facto military response.
This report presents data on the victims of the necropolitics applied to border control at the western Euro-African border during the first six months of 2022. These data have been confirmed by the Human Rights Observatory run by the Ca-minando Fronteras collective.
In the report, we also considered it important to analyse the tools used to exert systematic violence against migrant communities. We have attempted to lay the foundations for an analysis of the situation at the border over the last six months that will focus on human rights and counter belligerent narratives and warmongering fervour. It is crucial that we analyse the violence suffered by migrant communities on a daily basis, the sources of this violence and its impact on migrants’ lives, many of which are cut short after sustained rights violations.
This report was drawn up using data from the Observatory of the Western Euro-African Border founded by the Ca-minando Fronteras collective in 2015, which records victims migrating on Mediterranean (Strait of Gibraltar, Alborán Sea, Algeria) and Atlantic (Canary Islands) sea routes, as well as on overland routes via the border fences in Ceuta and Melilla.
The numbers and stories presented in this report play an essential role as we strive for greater respect for the rights of victims and their families. Their memory must remain with us, lighting the way to truth, justice and reparation and ensuring that these deaths cease once and for all.
