We are highly alarmed by the endless loss of human lives in the Mediterranean Sea and along several routes to Europe. Every day, thousands of people see themselves forced to embark on desperate journeys through the dangerous waters of the Central and Eastern Mediterranean, along the Atlantic and Balkan route, in the English Channel and along the borders between Poland and Belarus, with the hope to reach Europe. More often than not, these people are forced to flee violence, poverty and conflicts in their countries of origin. They are mothers and fathers looking for a better future for their children, young people longing for education and better opportunities, and people fleeing wars and persecution.
Ten years have passed since that ‘never again in Europe’ pronounced by all the European Governments and Institutions after the shipwreck of 2013 in Lampedusa, where 368 people lost their lives. Nothing has changed since then. We keep on counting the deaths of children, women and men.
However, today, we still lack an integrated system to count deaths, and many of those who lost their lives at sea will never be identified and will be buried without a name or a funeral. The issue of identification is of the utmost importance. Not only because we are talking about human beings who lost their lives but also because families and people are still waiting to put an end to their grief. The lack of identification has significant effects on the psychological well-being of family members and severe repercussions from a bureaucratic point of view.
It is high time that European Institutions took urgent measures to develop a European database for the identification of the victims of migration. It shall be a centralised system that makes it possible to gather and store all the information needed in order to identify the people who lost their lives.
We hereby request the European Union and the Member States to promptly act in order to:
- Develop or, in those countries where it already exists, implement a database for each European country to gather any information whatsoever about nameless corpses and missing migrants;
- Develop at least one hub in every country, where the families of missing migrants can be interviewed and ante-mortem data can be recorded;
- Appoint a single European subject for missing people in order to cross-check the information about missing migrants and that regarding Nameless Corpses collected by national agencies;
- Make the gathering and sharing of ante-mortem and post-mortem data mandatory among EU member states.
The procedures needed to increase the probability of identifying corpses and, therefore, protect the rights of the victims and their families can be deemed to have been implemented only when the above points are carried out. Therefore, we hereby request the European Union to acknowledge and protect the right to identify everybody, including those who lost their lives while migrating.
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The petition is also promoted thanks to the support of ActionAid International Italia E.T.S and Fondazione Realizza il Cambiamento, within the framework of the "THE CARE – Civil Actors for Rights and Empowerment" project, co-financed by the European Union.