Enforced disappearances, necro-violence, and posthumous struggles for justice in Europe’s borderlands

“Back home we were listed among the missing. Our parents did not know if we were dead or alive, and the pain burns stronger for the missing than for the dead.”

“Journey to Sardinia”, Azzou (Algerian Harraga rapper)

“I need to know the truth. Where is my son?”

Souad

Following decades of migrant-led struggles to resist and counter the mass killing and disappearance of migrants, particularly throughout the Americas, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances adopted a General Comment on enforced disappearances in the migration context in September 2023, providing guidance on the application of the Convention to ‘pushbacks’ and b/ordering regimes of endangerment and abandonment that remove persons from recognition and protection of the law, as extreme forms of group-based racialising (and therefore political) repression tantamount to torture.

As a (counter)narrative lens, the framework of enforced disappearances offers an opening for rupturing the im/possibilities of state juridical justice and for recentring no-borders visions of migration justice for migrant and bordering communities living with the dead, including through reparative truth and healing. The politico-legal framework of enforced disappearances promotes systemic responses to the structural and authoritarian violences at/of borders by prefiguring transnational infrastructures for search, recovery and postmortem care of remains of those killed by borders, including family-accompanying systems that recognise and support those searching for loved ones. Such processes can become a meaningful contribution to the limited means for accounting for and responding to the causes of border deaths and the repression of truth(s) through necroviolence and post-mortem uncare, that deny the very deaths and ‘last rights’ of those killed by borders, including the collectivised rights for them to be searched for and identified.

The project aims to make and hold spaces for co-visioning and co-creation of critical political-legal strategies and interventions that centre collective truth-telling and healing and promote transformative posthumous struggles against the racist state violence of borders.

project

collective colearning

Inspired and guided by struggles around migrant disappearances throughout the Americas and US-Mexico border, this collective inquiry and cocreation process seek to codesign strategies and interventions that respond to the increasing patterns of death and disappearance at Europe’s borders, with a focus on the Greek-Turkish borderlands. The aim of such strategies and interventions is to expose the invisibilisation of the violence of borders and the erasure of those it kills, by seeking recognition and reparative truth for the mass loss of life caused by Europe’s bordering regimes, including through the establishment of transnational infrastructures to support families and migrant communities searching for loved ones.

As part of a group of activists and researchers working on these issues in the Greek migration justice space, we are exploring the possibilities and prospects for the mobilisation of the legal and political category of enforced disappearances in ways that centre transformative and healing justice for the violence of borders. As direct-action and legal groups that support and accompany families and communities whose loved ones were disappeared and perished by the racist state (necro)violence of Europe’s borders, we are currently undertaking a collective mapping of our embodied experiences of postmortem uncare and necroviolence in relation to searches, tracing, identification, burial and repatriation of remains.

We are doing this with the purpose of also exploring counternarratives of posthumous struggles around the informal practices and infrastructures of postmortem care by direct-actions groups and intermediaries and the ways in which, e.g. through the centring of collective grief, they ground and make way for relational and decolonial, transformative and healing justice and reparations for the structural and mass violence of borders.

legal interventions

The UN General Comment on enforced disappearances in the migration context (adopted by the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances in September 2023) considers most ‘pushbacks’ to be acts of enforced disappearance, and other patterns of extreme repressive violence in operation in borderlands as policies that expose individuals to the risk of enforced disappearance. The Comment obliges states and international organisations to establish transnational infrastructure and processes for recovering and identifying migrant bodies and cooperating transnationally in the identification, tracing, burial and, where possible, repatriation of their remains through family-accompanying procedures.

We had engaged with the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances throughout the process of its elaboration of this General Comment—making two submissions, in June 2022 and June 2023 (the latter with Legal Centre Lesvos), both published by the Committee.

We are currently in the process of preparing legal interventions to the Committee and relevant EU institutions concerning their particular obligations at the EU’s external borders, with a focus on the Greek-Turkish borderlands.

forensic community engagement

Since October 2023, we have been participating in the ‘Migrant Disaster Victim Identification (MDVI)’ project, supported by the European Cooperation on Science and Technology foundation (COST Action 22106). The project convenes forensics and other experts around the central aim of promoting the recognition of and response to the mass loss of life occurring in the context of migration as an (ongoing) ‘disaster’ in the terms of the Interpol’s international disaster victim identification (DVI) frameworks so as to mobilise expert teams and transnational infrastructures for the search, recovery, tracing and identification of persons killed and disappeared at/by borders.

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We have been cocreating a ‘living’ resource list on enforced disappearances in the migration context, accessible here (Google doc), and would greatly appreciate any feedback, suggestions or contributions.

We are planning to issue an open call for participation in a colearning space on ‘Enforced disappearances, necroviolence and posthumous struggles for migration justice’ in the coming months.

If you are interested in more information and exploring opportunities for collaboration, please get in touch: v.azarova@debordercollective.org and n.magugliani@debordercollective.org.

submissions

Initial Comments in View of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ Elaboration of a New General Comment on Enforced Disappearances in the Migration Context, submitted on 20 June 2022

Comments on the Committee on Enforced Disappearances draft General Comment 1 on Enforced Disappearances in the Context of Migration, submitted on 15 June 2023 (with Legal Centre Lesvos)

research

Valentina Azarova, ‘Enforced Disappearance, Necro-Violence and Posthumous Politics in the Borderlands: From the Sonoran Desert to Evros’, Badacze i badaczki na granicy / Researchers on the Border, Research Seminar at Polish-Belarus Border, 21-23 April 2023

Valentina Azarova, Amanda Brown and Itamar Mann, ‘The Enforced Disappearance of Migrants’, Boston University Journal of International Law 40:1 (2022) 133-204

selected sources*

Border Graves Reporting Team, Revealed: More than 1,000 unmarked graves discovered along EU Migration Routes, The Guardian, December 2023

Alexis Okeowo, ‘The crisis of missing migrants’, The New Yorker, 16 January 2023

Cristina Cattaneo et al., ‘The rights of migrants to the identification of their dead: an attempt at an identification strategy from Italy’, International Journal of Legal Medicine (2023)

Simon Robins, Addressing Migrant Bodies on Europe’s Southern Frontier: An agenda for research and practice (2014)

Estela ​​Schindel, ‘Death by “Nature”: The European Border Regime and the Spatial Production of Slow Violence’, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40:2 (2022) 428–46

Paola Díaz Lize and Anna Rahel Fischer, ‘Death and Disappearance at Border Crossings: Factualization Devices and Truth(s) Accounts’, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 5:1 (2022)

Iosif Kovras and Simon Robins, ‘Death as the Border. Managing Missing Migrants and Unidentified Bodies at the EU’s Mediterranean Frontier’, Political Geography 55 (2016) 40-49

Caminando Fronteras, Victims of the Necrofrontier 2018-2022: For memory and justice (December 2022)

John Washington, “I Didn’t Exist”: A Syrian Asylum-Seeker’s Case Reframes Migrant Abuses as Enforced Disappearances, The Intercept, 28 February 2021

Grażyna Baranowska, Disappeared Migrants and Refugees: The Relevance of the International Convention on Enforced Disappearance in Their Search and Protection, German Institute for Human Rights (2020)

* See more in ‘living’ resource list here.

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