Many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who seek protection, asylum or work in Europe each year are "at great risk of harm and death" because few protection services are available to help them on their perilous journeys, according to a report released this week by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The report says that immediate humanitarian assistance, shelter, referral mechanisms and access to justice are often unavailable in movement hubs, including in the Sahara.
“The absence of critical services is placing refugees and migrants at great risk of harm and death and is also triggering dangerous secondary onward movements,” Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR Special Envoy for the Western & Central Mediterranean situation told journalists at a briefing Tuesday in Geneva.
“Some refugees and migrants underestimate the risks, while many fall victim to the narratives of smugglers and traffickers,” he said.
The report, which covers 15 countries in Africa, says the lack of protection services on the main routes used by refugees and migrants is alarming and has become more acute than in recent years. It highlights the horrors faced by refugees and migrants as they risk their lives on dangerous routes stretching from the East, Horn of Africa and West Africa to the Atlantic coast of North Africa and across the Central Mediterranean to Europe.
The UNHCR reports that refugees and migrants from some 20 different African countries "die crossing the desert or near borders". In addition to sub-Saharan Africans, it says an increasing number of people are arriving in North Africa from countries in Asia and the Middle East, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt and Syria.
The report says most of the refugees and migrants “suffer serious human rights violations en route” including "sexual and gender-based violence, kidnappings for ransom, torture, and physical abuse."
“Protection services along the routes that can help mitigate the risks these people face — such as immediate humanitarian assistance, shelter for people who have been exposed to violence, and access to justice — are often not available,” Cochetel said.
The report also documents the negative impact of new crises, such as the conflicts in Sudan and the Sahel, on the availability of resources to provide protection services. The lack of sustained funding further threatens the limited services that are currently available.
“In many countries, the services that were there in 2022-2023 are no longer there. This is the case, in particular, in Morocco, in Mauritania, in Sudan because of the conflict, in the northern part of Niger, in the southern part of Algeria. So, basically these are in key hubs, key crossing routes that are used by migrants and refugees,” he said.
Aside from the conflict in Sudan, several other crises emerged in 2023 that forced people to flee their homes.
“Regrettably, more emergencies cannot be ruled out in 2024,” authors of the report warn. “Neither can the human need of people to flee or abandon their homes to find safety and or better… basic life conditions for themselves and their families.”
Cochetel observed that the lack of sustained funding threatens the limited services that currently are available, including search and rescue missions.
“In the past, la gendarmerie nationale [the national military police] in Agadez, Niger, would pick up people who had been stranded or abandoned by smugglers and traffickers in the desert. But such rescue missions,” he said, “no longer occur along that route.”
“The only country on the African continent where I know that this concept is implemented is in Djibouti,” Cochetel said.
He said Djiboutian authorities are patrolling the land side of their coast “to see people that have been abandoned by smugglers in the desertic areas or people who have returned with the same smugglers from Yemen and who are dropped in the middle of nowhere,” adding that such search and rescue projects needed to be developed in partnership with local authorities in Nigeria, southern Morocco, Mauritania, and other desert regions.
“We would need that to save more lives and bring back to safety people stranded or abandoned there,” Cochetel said.
Since the publication of the previous report in July 2022, the UNHCR says an estimated 3,045 individuals have been reported dead or missing along the combined Central and Western Mediterranean and Northwest Africa Maritime routes.
“However, the real figures could be significantly higher, as many incidents likely go undetected and remain unrecorded,” it said.
While the report is intended to alert governments to the shortcomings in support services, UNHCR's Cochetel said it also aims to provide useful information on the availability of services for refugees and migrants who are "lost, stranded and abused along the routes".
The report provides tailored information for refugees and migrants on the services currently available on the various routes. For example, Cochetel said, the report includes GPS coordinates and WhatsApp numbers that refugees and migrants can use to locate essential, potentially life-saving protection services.
It also serves as a reference for donors to target investments in resources where they are most needed, and to the actors best placed to provide these essential services.
The geographical coverage of the new report has been expanded to 15 countries: Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Somalia and Sudan.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: Mapping for Protection Services Report — a routes-based approach to protection services along mixed movement routes, UNHCR, report, released June 4, 2024
https://reporting.unhcr.org/western-and-central-mediterranean-situation-routes-based-approach-protection-services-along-mixed