Border Deaths - the Mediterranean and beyond

But even all this is an incomplete picture. The figures above count only those who die at sea on the way north. They do not count those who die during violent interceptions by the Libyan Coast Guard. They do not count those who die in Libyan detention centres.

The IOM recorded over 1,000 migrant deaths and disappearances in Libya in 2024 alone. In 2024, more than 100 bodies were exhumed from mass graves in Libya. A 2026 UN Human Rights Office report covering 2024–2025 documented how migrants were routinely subjected to slavery, torture, forced labour, forced prostitution and other forms of sexual violence — in conditions described as an "exploitative model that has become 'business as usual' — a brutal and normalised reality."

Between January 2018 and September 2025, at least 145,437 people were intercepted at sea and forcibly returned to Libya. The number of migrants held in Libyan detention centres rose from 725,304 in 2024 to 867,055 in 2025. Interceptions have continued into 2026, with 507 recorded in a single week in February, 190 in late March, and 708 in early April.
What happened to them afterwards is, by official account, largely unrecorded. What we know, we know because of the tireless and often self-endangering work of the people who lived through it — survivors who continue to bear witness, to document, and to testify at great personal risk. Organisations like Refugees in Libya are indispensable to any understanding of the scale of suffering and injustice that the official statistics cannot — or will not — capture.

Niger — Europe's Border in the Sahara

The EU's strategy of externalising its borders did not stop at the Mediterranean. In 2015, at the height of what European politicians called the "migration crisis," Niger — one of the world's poorest countries, heavily dependent on international aid — was pressured into passing Law 2015-36, which forbade drivers from transporting migrants northward from Agadez towards Libya and Algeria.

Before the law's enforcement, migration was an integral part of daily life in the Agadez region. Transport, accommodation, food — entire local economies had grown around the movement of people through this ancient crossroads of the Sahara. Migration was not a criminal enterprise; it was a resilience strategy, essential to survival in a region with few economic alternatives. Drivers were not smugglers. They were a normal part of a normal economy.

The law destroyed this. Drivers had their vehicles confiscated and faced charges of human trafficking. Promised alternative support never materialised. Large parts of the population became unemployed overnight.

And the dying began. Forced onto unofficial, remote desert routes to avoid police checkpoints, people paid more, trusted less, and died in greater numbers. Deaths in the Sahara increased sixfold between 2015 and 2017. Testimonies from survivors document what this meant: "No water, no water. My body was dead but it kept on walking. I could see the souls of my ancestors, like angels. I was really almost dead. In Niger you pay for your death."

The EU funded this. Through the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, Niger received €247.5 million — the largest single-country allocation. The EU's Migration Platform in Niger was led by the head of the EU delegation. Civil society organisations consistently noted that invited participants were selected based on their alignment with European donor interests.

The IOM, meanwhile, ran transit centres where rescued desert migrants were offered "voluntary return" — with multiple indications that return was presented as the only option and that subsequent support in countries of origin was rarely delivered.

The case of Niger, as the mEUterei collective writes, "clearly demonstrates how the Global North is still exploiting dependencies created during colonisation to pursue its own economic interests under the mantle of 'development cooperation' and at the same time to ward off migration at any cost."

In November 2023, Niger's military junta repealed the law. The EU expressed alarm. Residents of Agadez celebrated.

Source

mEUterei Authors' Collective: "Borders of Violence — The EU's Undeclared War on Refugees", Assoziation A, 2022, pp. 149–156 — Chapter: "Niger – Europe's Deadly Frontiers in the Sahara" assoziation-a.de/dokumente/mEUterei_Borders_of_Violence.pdf