On This Journey No One Cares If You Live Or Die
Abuse, Protection and Justice along Routes between East and West Africa and Africa’s Mediterranean Coast
A route-based perspective on key risks
“The mixed movement of refugees and migrants on the African continent is often reduced to its more mediatized aspect – the perilous crossings of the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. While some of the movements take root in North Africa, many include multiple legs through several countries in an attempt to reach safety and/or better opportunities.
The protection risks and extreme forms of violence and exploitation refugees and migrants are confronted with on land are much less documented. The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) decided to work together to map them out and have an updated and more precise understanding of where these risks and different forms of violence are perceived to be more acute and who are reported to be the perpetrators. To do so, many different sources of information were employed including 4Mi interviews with over 31,000 refugees and migrants between 2020 and 2023 by the MMC, the Missing Migrants Project and Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative of IOM, and UNHCR Protection Monitoring.
This joint report builds on the data collected by IOM, MMC and the UNHCR during the period from January 2020 to March 2023. It is a new iteration of a joint UNHCR and MMC report issued in 2020 covering the period 2018–2019 (UNHCR and MMC, 2020).
Its main purpose is to identify and map risks, as well as draw attention to the serious violations of human rights and abuses experienced by people moving in search of safety or a better life.
Based on the mapping, the report serves to further develop and improve the vastly insufficient or non-existing programmatic response to the problem faced by those on the move along the Central Mediterranean route.”
International Organization for Migration (IOM), Mixed Migration Centre (MMC), Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (2024). On This Journey, No One Cares if You Live or Die: Abuse, Protection and Justice along Routes between East and West Africa and Africa’s Mediterranean Coast. Volume 2. IOM, MMC, UNHCR, Geneva
71 p.
