 Hello and welcome to the podcast, Living Without Them, Stories of Families Left Behind. We are your hosts, I'm Marta Sanchez-Dioniz and I'm Kate Dearden. And we work on the International Organization for Migrations Missing Migrants Project at the Organizations Data Analysis Center based in Berlin, Germany. By now, the numbers and scenes of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe or disappearing as they attempt to cross the border from Mexico into the United States have become common items in the news and politics. IOM's Missing Migrants Project has recorded the deaths and disappearances of over 40,000 people in the last seven years on migration routes worldwide. Recordkeeping from NGOs and journalists suggests that at least 84,000 people have died since 1996. But something that is not talked about as much is what about the families of the people who die or go missing. For each person who has died in vain trying to reach another country, there is a family and community that they have left behind and who are immensely affected by the loss or disappearance of this person. Over the past two years, we have been working on a project that set out to learn more about families of missing migrants, about their experiences of searching for their loved ones, the impacts that the loss has had on them and what they do to cope. The goal was to learn how families could be better supported and to raise awareness about their struggles. In this four-episode podcast series, we will zero in on what we found in three of the countries where we conducted research, in the United Kingdom, Ethiopia, and Spain. We look at who these families are and how their lives are shaped by the experiences of losing a partner, father, mother, child, cousin, or even a friend. Today, we talk about how deaths and disappearances during migration tell a story of unequal access to safe and legal mobility options. Why it is important to document and record these deaths, but also to go beyond the data and talk about the impact on the families and communities left behind. First, we chat with Julia Black, who also works with us on the Missing Migrants Project, about what we know about migrant deaths and disappearances worldwide. The vast majority of deaths that we have recorded in the Missing Migrants Project are in the Mediterranean, so this involves people primarily from West, Central, and East Africa migrating through North Africa and then across the Mediterranean in an attempt to reach Europe. One thing that's not so well understood about the Mediterranean region is that, yes, many of the migrants who have lost their lives are coming from Africa and to some degree the Middle East, but there is a huge diaspora network within Europe of a migrant background, like me, who are also impacted by these deaths. I think very often when people think about the Mediterranean migration, they think about the poorest of the poor people who are desperately fleeing a terrible situation at home, and this is not true. It's very often people who have or had a job who are simply seeking out a better life for themselves, and very often are trying to meet up with family or friends of family in Europe who are already in Europe, and so when you talk about the impacts of these 20,000 plus deaths in the Mediterranean in just the last few years, this has really far-reaching effects into communities within Europe with large migrant populations, whether that's Spain, whether that's the UK, Germany, this is really a Europe-wide issue, not just an issue for Africa. The issue is not just about those in countries of origin, it is also affecting families across the globe, but one of the problems is the immense challenges involved in documenting deaths and disappearances, especially on migration routes overseas, such as the Mediterranean crossing to Europe. When people go missing at sea, their remains may not be recovered and no institutional efforts are being made to search for them, identify them, and to notify their families. More than two-thirds of the people who die are never recovered, so that means that there are bodies lost in the Mediterranean after a shipwreck that are never recovered. We don't know who they are, their families will never have a grave at which to mourn their loss. There's usually a search-and-rescue operation, which understandably prioritizes recovering people who are alive, but this very often means that many, many bodies are just lost. These human remains are just in the Mediterranean somewhere potentially very likely never recovered. So what is the international organization for migration doing? We talked to Dr. Frank Lasko, Director of IOM's Data Analysis Centre in Berlin, about how the missing migrants project came about. IOM became increasingly involved in collecting data on missing migrants back in 2014 following a series of tragedies that occurred in the Mediterranean around the island of Lampedusa. There were two major shipwrecks of the coast of Lampedusa in October 2013, which caught the attention of policymakers and media, not only in Europe but around the world. IOM decided to respond by launching a global project to systematically record the number of persons perishing either at sea or at land borders around the world or persons who are reported missing. The aim of this project is for me to bear witness to this issue. This is an ongoing global crisis. It's really a failure, you know, one of the great political failures of our times, that this is such an epidemic. And I do worry a bit that sometimes missing migrants project being such a data-oriented project, that data can be dehumanizing, right? When you talk about 40,000 deaths, this is a statistic. When you talk about an individual's story, you know, who has lost their life, this is a person. And so in terms of what we know about the families, unfortunately, it's very little. I mean, we suspect that there are, there is a huge population of people who has no idea what has happened to their mother, brother, father. For each person who is reported missing or dead, there may be five, 10, 15, 20 people affected, family members living in other countries whose lives may be devastated by this occurrence. And who may be living in limbo, who may not know for certain that their family member has died, even if they know that that person is no longer likely to return home. They may not know exactly where that person died. They may not be able to visit the burial site. And so this issue of the lack of knowledge and information about the families of the missing migrants is something that we wanted to focus on within the project and draw the attention of the media and policymakers to the need to also protect the living as well as, you know, remember those who died trying to cross borders around the world. As human beings, regardless of status, migrants and their families are protected by international human rights law. The right to life is universal. It is not bound by borders or determined by one's nationality. Everyone is entitled to this right without discrimination. States have committed themselves to protecting the human rights of all people, including migrants, regardless of status and to saving lives. There are international obligations concerning missing persons in general and a requirement on states to search for missing persons. But there are also specific international obligations now which refer to missing migrants. However, these obligations are not legally binding. First of all, within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals, there is a specific target that refers to the number of countries with migration policies that facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration. And under that heading, countries are asked to report on their efforts to promote safe migration. And then more recently in the global compact on migration, there is a commitment to cooperate internationally to save lives and prevent migrant deaths and injuries through individual or joint search and rescue operations. And the objective also calls for the collection and exchange of relevant information and specifically refers to the need to collect better information about the families affected by these tragedies and to assist those families. So that's quite a strong objective. Now that's not fully legally binding, but nonetheless, most countries in the world have agreed to try to reach this target, this objective along with 22 other objectives in the global compact on migration. A truly effective response to address deaths and disappearances during migration requires that we go beyond the data and we listen to those who are most deeply affected by these disappearances. For the past two years, a research team led by IOM has spent time with families of missing migrants in several countries, having in depth conversations with them. The Families Project is in a way an attempt to build on the work that has been already completed on missing migrants and their families. There's pointed reports that have documented experiences, testimonies of the families of missing migrants around the world. What we wanted to do this time is to give families the opportunity to decide on their own what was important for them, what mattered, what really had to be included in the reports. So this is what sets apart this project. Again, building on the other fantastic work that many other people have carried out, the way in which we gave the microphone to the families for them to be able to articulate what really mattered to them. This is Dr. Gabriela Sánchez, Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies and the Research Coordinator for this project. The Families Project involved conversations with 76 families of missing migrants in four different countries, Spain, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom. We also contacted more than 30 stakeholders and the goal was to map the legal bureaucratic administrative obstacles that families encounter, but also to document the ways in which they had themselves developed tools to find their missing locals. And the goal here, the hope of our study was that it could capture in depth what really mattered to the families, what was important for them to get out there. Talking with families really showed how they try to search for their missing loved ones and the barriers they come up against. These barriers vary a lot depending on their different circumstances, such as the country where they live and their legal status there, the migration route where their loved one went missing, their socioeconomic status, their gender and so on. In general, most of the families interviewed had been unable to establish whether their missing loved one was dead or alive, leading them to experience ambiguous loss when there is no clear closure or sufficient reason behind what happened. Most of the time, the first point of contact are friends and family members, people that have probably also lost a loved one or, especially in the case of young people, the parents or the relatives of the other young person who might have traveled or left with a migrant, for example. Another key actor in the process of the search was the smuggler. This is something that we notice across all four countries. People, despite the fact that we often think about the person of the smuggler as somebody who is always violent or always threatening, in most cases families actually had a personal connection to the person who had facilitated their loved one's journey. So they felt naturally inclined to reach out to them for information. There was also the role that social and mass media, place in search, people most of the time, not always, but most of the time have access to social media are very active on migrant pages, post pictures of their loved ones and try to connect with other friends and family members who may be online and who may be able as well to repost their information. The state or local government have not been able to assist families. In the case of the UK and Spain, for example, we identified that the immigration status of the people that the families that we interviewed prevented them from reaching out to the authorities, fearing that they could be deported or arrested or facing any other kind of immigration enforcement response. Many other times what we also found out was that the families felt disrespected, misunderstood. In some occasions they were not even allowed into some of the buildings to carry out their search. And we believe that this is connected to the fact that there is really not a strong system or a mechanism that allows families to look for their loved ones. In all of the interviews that we carried out, we identified instances of abuse of efforts to extract money from families on the part of third parties that may call them promising to release some information related to their loved ones. We were as well able to identify testimonies from women in places like Spain or also in the United Kingdom that reflect how many times they were also excluded from decision-making, how they were not allowed to participate in meetings or gatherings in which they could have obtained information or disseminate information concerning their loved ones. Sexual harassment and intimidation was also very well documented in the study, how women are often conditioned access to information in terms of sexual favors. We in fact documented also cases of women who were sexually assaulted in the process of looking for their missing loved ones and many times having to accept that kind of abuse with the hope that this is going to lead to some sort of information regarding their their search. On the missing migrants project we receive requests for information about missing migrants from a variety of actors and for me it's always you know profoundly heartbreaking when a family member reaches out to us saying you know I've tried every other option I'm getting no information about the loved one who is who is missing and for me one of the most impactful cases of this was a woman from Tunisia who reached out to me about her brother and this woman told me her story and I had this kind of moment of realization where I realized her brother is the same age as my brother and I'm very close with my brother and you know of course love him very dearly and just to have someone reach out to you who is in somehow a similar relation to a ship to her brother and to imagine you know knowing that this person who you love and care about who you grew up with left on a boat and you knew it was risky he knew it was risky but he was desperate. Giving the collective history or our collective history as human beings we have all experienced the loss or disappearance of a love one in one way or another how can we find answers to our collective loss to our our collective pain and how we can collectively find a solution. In the next three episodes of this series we will listen to the families of people lost in migration journeys and we will talk more about their experiences the impacts of their loss and what they do to cope with this. Join us in the next episode where we hear stories from families of missing migrants in Ethiopia.