The data presented here are the product of exhaustive monitoring carried out by Ca-minando Fronteras 365 days a year. Working with migrant communities, rescue services, family networks and human rights defenders on the ground, we collect, confirm and systematise the necessary data.
This report presents data on the victims of the necropolitics applied in border control at the western Euro-African border in 2022. The figures have been confirmed by the Human Rights Observatory run by Ca-minando Fronteras. They relate to victims on the Strait of Gibraltar, Alboran Sea and Algerian sea routes in the Western Mediterranean, the Canary Islands route in the Atlantic and the overland routes culminating at the border fences in Ceuta and Melilla.
Our monitoring throughout 2022 points to an increasingly deadly trend on these migration routes in recent years, as we explained in the recent report Victims of the Necrofrontier 2018-2022: For Memory and Justice. In 2022 alone, Ca-minando Fronteras confirmed the deaths of 2,390 people on migration routes heading for Europe.
The route linking the western coast of North Africa and the Canary Islands once again emerged as the deadliest, with 1,784 victims. In the report, we compile an extensive list of consequences of migration policies that hinder, obstruct or prevent rescue operations to save migrant people.
In 2022, we witnessed a flagrant example of transnational rights violations on the land border between Melilla and Nador, where 40 people lost their lives on 24 June in an incident in which Spanish and Moroccan police officers employed violent deterrent tactics, including real bullets.
The report focuses on the invisible nature of the Algerian migration route running from northern Algeria to the Levante coast of Spain and the Balearic Islands. The long distances involved, the failure of migrants’ friends and relatives to raise the alarm and the authorities’ failure to render assistance make it impossible to reconstruct the tragedies taking place in this region or to count the total number of victims on this route.
In the report, we reiterate that the vast majority of victims’ bodies on sea routes (91.42%) disappear without a trace. In these circumstances, families and communities experience ambiguous loss, which has multiple legal and psychological repercussions.
Download the Monitoring the Right to Life 2022 report in English here or scroll down to the bottom of the page to find it in Spanish, French and Catalan.
Are you looking for a relative or a friend who has gone missing while attempting to migrate? If so, you can contact us here.
