34 years ago, on this exact date, the Berlin Wall fell. 1989 was also the year I was born. It was a time, I believe, when there was huge optimism about the future of Europe and what the EU itself could stand for.
Today, what I see is a reversal of that hope. I see the condoning of gross human rights abuses, hypocrisy from European leadership, and the normalisation of mass death on our borders. I see EU policies that, outside the EU, are propping up dictatorships, militias and other systems that oppress people further, and in the long-term, are increasing the reasons why they need to flee.
I am a journalist, not an activist, and I don’t propose specific changes. But as a journalist, my job is to speak truth to power and to point out gross wrongdoing.
Aside from being a journalist, I am also a European, and over almost a decade now of reporting on migration-related issues, I have become increasingly horrified and ashamed about what is being done in my name; at the structures that are being built up to silence those undergoing abuse; and the rhetoric that is being used to distance our citizens from the human consequences of what we’re responsible for.
During this speech, I’m going to talk about some of what I’ve found out, but there is obviously limited time, and I hope attendees will consider reading my book, which explains everything in more detail.
First, to tell you a bit about me and why I am talking about this. I’m a correspondent for the Irish Times, but I’ve also reported from across Africa and the Middle East for a wide range of other media, including the Guardian, CNN, Al Jazeera, Channel 4 News, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
In 2018, I was unexpectedly contacted by refugees incarcerated in Libyan migrant detention centres, who were using hidden phones to appeal for help. Since that day, I have focused on what is happening to people along what is known as the Central Mediterranean migration route, between Libya or Tunisia and Italy or Malta. The UN has called it the deadliest migration route in the world.
Since 2014, more than 28,200 men, women and children have died or gone missing on the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe – more than 22,400 of them along this route. It’s a staggering number that’s also likely to be an underestimate.
The main reason I focused on the Central Mediterranean is because of the EU’s role.
In 2017, the EU and Italy began what appeared tobe a deliberate circumnavigation of international law, aimed at keeping people off European territory. We carry out surveillance, flying drones and planes to spot boats, while spending tens of millions of euros on supporting the Libyan coastguard to intercept them. International law says a European vessel cannot return people to Libya, so we pay for the Libyans to do it instead. In less than seven years, more than 125,000 people have been forced back to a militia-run state where they are often locked up indefinitely in detention centres that Pope Francis, among others, have called concentration camps.
They are not charged with anything, not given access to a lawyer or a way to appeal their imprisonment. Among them are many children, who go without an education. Women, often pregnant as a result of rape, have given birth in the detention centres without medical care.
Many fled wars in countries like Somalia or Sudan, or dictatorships like Eritrea. In countries neighbouring theirs, they were extorted or abused by security forces, threatened with deportation, or made to live in refugee camps without enough to eat. When they try to travel further, they are held for ransom by smugglers and traffickers, their families forced to sell everything they own to raise thousands of dollars.
International human rights lawyers say the EU-supported interceptions at sea and return to detention in Libya could be considered crimes against humanity. My book was among other evidence cited in an International Criminal Court submission, by the ECCHR, last year that named 16 high-level decision makers from EU member states, the EU Commission, FRONTEX, the European External Action Service, and the EU naval force operation as alleged co-perpetrators.
I began documenting what was happening to people caught at sea because I realised European officials seemed to be deliberately not doing it. One question I asked multiple times, including to officials here in the European Parliament, was how many die in detention.
Frontex told me it is not in their mandate to track this, as Libya is a sovereign state. EEAS told me to ask the UN Refugee Agency. UNHCR had no comprehensive figures. I myself documented large numbers of deaths from starvation, medical neglect, shootings, bombings, and torture.
The dead included at least 53 people killed during a bombing and buried in unmarked graves.
They included detainees who were praying when a militia opened fire on them. They included a young boy who died of treatable appendicitis and his father, who died weeks later of a heart condition and apparent heartbreak. There are so many more.
These deaths are the human consequences of our anti-migration efforts, but where is the accountability?
Returning people to Libya traps them in a cycle that also involves human smugglers. The smugglers work in league with both the coastguard and the detention centre management – this has been documented by an independent UN fact-finding mission, as well as by me. Videos of captives being tortured are even circulated by their families on social media, in a desperate bid to raise ransom money through crowdfunding. Eritrean journalist Meron Estefanos says around one billion euros in ransoms could have been paid to smugglers in Libya by now.
By funnelling people back to Libya, we support this monetisation of detention. And we increase the reasons why Libyans need to flee themselves.
While reporting the book, I spent Christmas on a rescue boat in the Mediterranean. The people it rescued in the end were Libyans escaping the militias – the same groups that EU money supports.
On that trip, I also witnessed first hand the criminalisation of search and rescue today amid the absence of European-led search and rescue efforts – I myself spent a year under criminal investigation after the mission.
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What I am telling you about Libya is just one example. Abuses are happening along the length of our borders, from Greece to Melilla.
The debate around migration often makes it sound like the only fault of the EU is inaction: such as failing to carry out search and rescue missions. But there has been prolonged and decisive action. Europe has exploited the wealth and resources of other countries for centuries, for example, and that has contemporary consequences which need to be acknowledged. Almost everyone I speak to who is trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea comes from a former European or British colony.
I was asked today to speak specifically about why people are trying to come here, but there is no single answer to that.
The so-called migration crisis needs to be reframed as a global inequality crisis. We need to understand that a large portion of the world’s population cannot get on planes, they can’t access visas. Those trying to move are not a homogenous group, they come from a huge range of different backgrounds and have many different reasons for needing to travel, including escaping conflict, persecution, corruption, the breakdown of institutions, and crushing poverty, or being reunited with family members. Among them are musicians, engineers, dentists, farmers, law graduates, former aid workers – and people with a vast range of other experiences and skills. The only thing they all have in common is that they don’t have the security offered by a powerful passport – which they will get if they become a European.
Though they do not not garner adequate global news coverage, there are recent or ongoing conflicts everywhere from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where nearly 7 million are displaced, to Tigray in northern Ethiopia, where estimates say hundreds of thousands could have been killed. There are people escaping Islamist insurgencies in the Lake Chad region, or insecurity in South Sudan. There are LGBT people looking for a place where they can live freely. It’s not that everyone is coming here, but those who do are seeking safety and security, and the chance to support people they’ve left behind. Excluding Palestinians, 75 percent of the world’s refugees are hosted in low and middle income countries: before the Ukraine war began, less than 10 percent of the world’s refugees lived in the EU; while more than 26 percent are currently hosted in Africa.
Others, who would likely not qualify as refugees, may still be suffering in ways exacerbated by Europe.
In West Africa, for example, we see overfishing by European vessels contributing to the destruction of local fishing industries, a key reason why many Senegalese fishers tell me they can no longer make a life at home.
Climate change is also expected to cause huge future displacement. In Somalia, during two visits last year, I saw first hand the result of a drought that is said to have played a role in 43,000 excess deaths in 2022 – half of them children under the age of five. The drought is said to have been climate change related, yet Somalia itself produces a tiny fraction of the emissions that Western countries do. Despite having one third of the population, my country, Ireland, produces around 51 times Somalia’s emissions, according to the World Bank. Germany, with about five times the population, produces more than 900 times more.
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At the moment, when you don’t have a powerful passport, legal travel routes – as they exist – are racist and discriminatory. This is true even for the elite of many African countries, who have no plan to stay here.
In September, I was at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Sweden. Some African journalists could not attend because they were denied visas, while others could barely participate because of visa restrictions. These are common and constant constraints for Africans in all industries.
For their part, European politicians talk about tackling the business model of smugglers. But this argument does not make sense. Someone once described migration routes to me as being like balloons: when one is squeezed, another will expand.
Since the Central Mediterranean became harder to cross, the so-called Atlantic sea route to Europe has gained in popularity. Nearly 7,000 people have died or gone missing attempting it since 2021, according to Spanish NGO Walking Borders. Their boats can end up floating at sea for months, as everyone on board dies one by one of thirst and hunger. Some, filled with corpses, wash ashore in the Caribbean and Brazil.
Smugglers are fulfilling a need. Without safe and legal routes available, people trying to move say they have no other choice. And the more difficult our borders become to cross, the more the smuggling industry is fuelled.
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Meanwhile – and this point is very important – EU money is arguably destabilising the region. The EU Trust Fund for Africa has seen 5 billion euro pledged to it since 2016, effectively to try and stop migration from 26 African countries. It has been widely criticised for its lack of transparency and how much is being spent on securitisation, oppressing people further.
My book details the funding empowering militias in Libya. Another example took place in neighbouring Sudan, where EU anti-migration money is said to have emboldened the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group which has now gone to war, resulting in the displacement of nearly 6 million. Many of those I met during a reporting trip to Tunisia in August were Darfuris who said they are escaping a new genocide perpetrated by the RSF, and are now trying to reach Europe too.
In Tunisia, president Kais Saied, accused of growing authoritarianism, is benefiting from European efforts to court him and potentially large sums of EU money. Black Africans were evicted from their homes and fired from their jobs after comments he made in February. Since then, some have been rounded up and dumped in the desert, where they were left to die. Could Tunisia become the new Libya? We are waiting to see.
I talk all the time to EU staff who anonymously say they are desperately unhappy with the current situation on Europe’s borders. They say stopping migration is being prioritised above all else, and without proper regard for human rights principles. Right now, I am speaking for them too.
The annual budget for Frontex has increased to 845 million euros, from 142 million in 2015. Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri stepped down last year over concerns the agency is not respecting human rights, but that does not seem to have prompted a real reckoning regarding how Frontex operates. I know this is something the Ombudsman has been actively challenging.
UN agencies, which receive EU funding, also play a role. While EU officials call the UN’s presence a safeguard, I’ve talked to a lot of unhappy UN staff who say they are being used to whitewash a system of brutal human rights abuses in Libya, for example. They say they cannot speak honestly about the effects of EU policy, or their own ineffectiveness and lack of oversight, because their leadership want to keep receiving EU funding.
Anonymously, UN staff worry about their own lack of accountability. Refugees are also frightened to report bad experiences with the UN, because they feel so vulnerable to retaliation.
In general – and this is probably the most important thing I will say in this whole speech – I’m always surprised by how few people with direct experience of forced or irregular migration are being included in conversations about it at all levels – this disconnect, I believe, is incredibly problematic. Their voices need to be listened to – both their experiences and their policy recommendations. That is the only way to understand what’s really happening, and by opening and maintaining lines of communication, you might be surprised by what you find out.
Speaking to refugees was how I first heard about allegations of corruption within the UNHCR refugee resettlement scheme in Sudan, for example, with staff accused of taking bribes of tens of thousands of dollars to facilitate legal resettlement. Following my investigation, and an internal probe, one staff member was found guilty of soliciting bribes and abusing power, though refugees complained that corruption continued. That is just one case underlining how little faith in the existing systems there is among refugees – something you must understand if you are involved in migration policy today.
As a former UN investigator told me, when there is huge demand and small supply there is always scope for exploitation. And as we all know, the numbers of refugee resettlement spaces offered by Western countries are woefully inadequate. According to UNHCR, less than 40,000 refugees were resettled to safe countries in 2021, for example – though there were more than 27 million refugees worldwide.
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One question I keep asking myself is how has the scale of abuses and mass death on Europe’s borders been allowed to happen?
Dehumanisation is taking place and we are all responsible.
We urgently need to start questioning our use of language. Refugee is a legal status, and migrant is a descriptor, but these are people like everyone else, with hopes, dreams, and families who love them.
When you hear the term “migration management” do you equate it with torture or indefinite detention?
What about the term “economic migrant”? For many people, poverty is a threat to life. It can mean starvation, as I saw in northern Uganda during the early covid lockdowns. It might mean watching family members die for other preventable reasons, all the time. Today, life expectancy for people in Sub-Saharan Africa is around 20 years less than it is for those in Europe.
The word “migrant” is being used to target and dehumanise a particular group of people – those without strong passports, who almost always have black or brown skin. Otherwise why would we immediately launch a rescue for a sinking ship filled with “tourists”, but not one with “migrants” on board? That’s where the hypocrisy comes in. In June 2020, the European Parliament passed a resolution saying “black lives matter.” But what about the mass deaths of black people on Europe’s borders?
Without migration, projections say that the EU’s population will fall from 453 million in 2026 to 320 million by the end of the century. Economists and other analysts say the EU needs migration. So why torture those who are enthusiastic to come and make a life here? Why inflict trauma they will live with forever, if they are lucky enough to survive the journey in the first place?
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Over previous years, when I spoke to Africans who wanted to reach Europe, they had the idea of Europe as a place where human rights are respected. But that image is being shattered.
And abusive policies are contagious. They are being picked up and expanded on across the West, and used by dictators and autocrats in other regions as justification too.
The speaker after me was originally supposed to be the European Commission Vice-President for Promoting our European Way of Life. In 2019, when Ursula von der Leyen was asked to justify this job title, she said one of our founding principles is that everybody has the same rights.
But my reporting shows this is not true.
It seems to me that we are at a pivotal point in European history and we need to ask more existential questions. Like what kind of Europe do we want to live in? Is it one, as an August New York Times front page said, where mass drowning has been normalised? Do we still believe in human rights for everyone? And what are the longterm ramifications of the harms already done?
We need to ask how future generations will judge us? Are we the people who reacted to a global inequality crisis by brutalising the most vulnerable and condoning their murder? Some people tell me they have lost hope that anything will change, but hope should not be a precondition to doing the right thing. You can stand on the right side of history even if you are hopeless.
So, to summarise:
There are many people travelling for different reasons. They’re fleeing wars, dictatorships, crushing poverty, climate change, corruption, and trying to be reunited with family members. They often come from countries that have been long exploited by Europe.
What the people I speak to want is a safe and dignified existence. Instead, they are facing death, torture, and other kinds of abuse on our borders in ways that have implicated European officials and the European public in alleged crimes against humanity.
And now compare the 1.3 million people who claimed asylum in the EU in 2015, the year of the so-called migrant crisis, with the more than 4 million Ukrainians we have accepted with open arms. The reception for Ukrainian refugees showed us that a more empathetic policy has been possible all along, but so far that has not been extended to people from other regions.
Instead, 34 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, we are erecting more barriers than ever.
Thank you for listening.
Children line up to receive free meals in Gulu, northern Uganda, April 2020
At a checkpoint on the border between South Sudan and Uganda, May 2020
Namuwongo, Kampala, March 2020
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