OIM — Fatal Journeys Volume 2: Identification and tracing of dead and missing migrants — 2016

Over 5,400 peo­ple are esti­mat­ed to have lost their lives on migra­to­ry routes around the world in 2015, and the first half of 2016 has only seen the num­bers increase. The Mediter­ranean alone wit­nessed a record num­ber of at least 3,770 deaths in 2015, with num­bers climb­ing in 2016. The Inter­na­tion­al Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion (IOM) esti­mates that over the last two decades, more than 60,000 migrants have died try­ing to reach their des­ti­na­tions, and this only includes deaths for which there is some record. Often occur­ring far from the pub­lic eye, an unknown num­ber of deaths go unrecorded.

In addi­tion to the tragedy of loss of life, the major­i­ty of those who die are nev­er iden­ti­fied. Their bod­ies may not ever be recov­ered, and even among those whose bod­ies are found, most are buried with at best a num­ber – not a name. Each uniden­ti­fied migrant rep­re­sents a miss­ing per­son for a fam­i­ly. Left with­out cer­tain­ty as to the fate of their loved one, fam­i­lies may search for years or life­times, nev­er ful­ly able to grieve their loss.

This sec­ond vol­ume in IOM’s series of glob­al reports on migrant deaths, Fatal Jour­neys Vol. 2: Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and Trac­ing of Dead and Miss­ing Migrants, has two main objec­tives. First, it pro­vides an in-depth analy­sis of avail­able data on migrant deaths for 2015. Data on the num­ber and pro­file of dead and miss­ing migrants are pre­sent­ed for dif­fer­ent regions of the world, draw­ing upon the data col­lect­ed through IOM’s Miss­ing Migrants Project. Sec­ond, the report exam­ines the chal­lenges fac­ing fam­i­lies and author­i­ties seek­ing to iden­ti­fy and trace miss­ing migrants. The study com­pares prac­tices in dif­fer­ent parts of the world, and iden­ti­fies a num­ber of inno­v­a­tive mea­sures that could poten­tial­ly be repli­cat­ed elsewhere.