Unless migrants die of dehydration or disease, they face rape, torture, sex trafficking and even organ theft along the dangerous land routes through North Africa to the Mediterranean and Europe, a new report co-authored by the United Nations has found.
The deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea have attracted global attention over the past decade, but “the number of people dying in the desert could be at least twice as high,” the report released Friday by two United Nations agencies and the Mixed Migration Centre, a non-governmental research group based in Denmark.
The report, based on interviews with more than 31,000 migrants along the routes from 2020 to 2023, documents the brutality faced by the growing number of people from dozens of countries attempting to cross the Sahel and Sahara, fleeing war, pollution and poverty.
Physical violence, apart from sexual violence, which the report counted separately, was the risk migrants most often identified. Dangers along the routes included arbitrary detention — often to extort money from their families — and trafficking for labor, sex or criminal activities. Migrants reported torture and even organ harvesting.
The violence often came from organized criminal gangs and militias, and in particular from the traffickers paid to escort people to Europe. Traffickers routinely lie to migrants about the dangers they will face, demand more money from them as they travel far from home, and provide little food, water, or other supplies along the way.
“I believed that all accidents happen at sea,” Teklebrhan Tefamariam Tekle, an Eritrean refugee now in Sweden, told an interviewer. “The accidents happen there in the Sahara. It’s full of Eritrean bodies. You find bones and skulls of dead people there.”
Others told of migrants and smugglers who simply abandoned those who died of thirst or injuries along the way. “You just keep going,” said one man, identified as Abraham. “You never look back.”
About a third of the adults interviewed are women, who face particular dangers. An estimated 90 percent of women and girls traveling along the Mediterranean route have been raped, according to a UN study 2020, and some have been forced into sex work to pay for their journey. There are reports of women being forced to marry kidnappers and bear their children, and others of women being forced to pay sexual favours for the safe passage of a group.
“The stories are truly horrific,” said Judith Sunderland, who was not involved in producing the report but, as deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia division, has interviewed hundreds of people who survived the journey to Europe. The stories in the report, she said, sounded tragically similar to the ones she heard.
“You just can’t believe that people can be so cruel to each other,” she added. “You can’t imagine how people still make these journeys, many of whom know the risks.”
Migrants named Libya, Algeria and Ethiopia as the most dangerous countries.
According to the UN, more than 72,400 migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea in 2024 alone. UN refugee agencyone of the sponsors of the new report, and at least 785 are known to be dead or missing. But as difficult as it is to keep track of the sea voyages, it is even harder, the report’s authors say, to estimate the number of people who attempt to reach Africa’s northern coast after crossing remote, sparsely populated and often lawless stretches of desert — and how many disappear along the way.
The report estimates that 1,180 people died crossing the Sahara between January 2020 and May 2024, but the true number is likely much higher.
European countries have long tried to discourage migrants to varying degrees, paying countries in North Africa to prevent people from making the sea crossing. recent research An investigation by a coalition of news organizations has found that European governments are in some cases paying for the training and equipment of North African security forces who push migrants away from the coast and back into the desert without supplies, endangering their lives.
In several countries that migrants attempt to cross, there is armed conflict and extreme poverty, or central government weakness.
The combination of instability and hostility leaves migrants in Africa with little chance of receiving help from authorities, or treatment for physical or emotional trauma, said the report, which was also sponsored by the UN’s International Organization for Migration.
The report, which updates and expands on a 2020 report, says that since then, “the security situation in several countries has further deteriorated, leading to increased displacement and cross-border movements of persons in need of international protection and migrants.”
