 According to the UNHCR, over one million migrants have arrived in Europe in 2015. Their journey is fraught with danger and some of those risks prove fatal. It is estimated that 3,600 people died or went missing in the Mediterranean during 2015. Their families are still waiting for news of them. One of the roles of the Red Cross is to help these families find out what has happened to their missing relatives. We are in the cemetery of Metilini in Lesbos Island where, as you can see, we have a lot of dead bodies unidentified which have been collected at sea. Most of the time by the coast guard, but often also bodies have been washed to the shore and they are buried here with the tombs with no mark. It's written in Coneyton on them. The day before crossing or sometimes the hour just before crossing, there is always a call to the family. I'm making it today. Family, if few hour later, one day, two days after, they don't hear anything about their relatives, who promised to call once on the right side. Then they start wondering, it's okay, maybe something wrong happened. And then direct themselves naturally to the National Red Cross of their country or to the ICRC closer delegation and they make what is called the tracing request. My son has disappeared. I'm afraid that he would have died while crossing the Mediterranean Sea and sometimes that's the first hint that we have which lead us to start investigating with the forensic authorities in this island or another place. When we have a tracing request about someone, let's say a migrant who is in Samos. Most of the time, as I said, thankfully, he is alive and he can be found but sometimes he's dead. He's drowned. Most of the time he's drowned. So what I do is get in contact with the local pathologists, get the information from them. Do you have a body such and such and compare it with the information in the tracing request. But when it's an obvious case or an incident or a CPREC, for example, we are not waiting for a tracing request but we are trying to get information who was there, how you identified them, how many you have not identified, how many are missing. It's a good building up of information which might be useful pretty soon. Usually it is useful. Greek coast guards are often the first on the scene when a refugee boat sinks. So working with the Central Police DNA Laboratory in Athens, Dr. Kouveris has been training personnel of the Hellenic Coast Guard to collect and record personal information from such sources as clothing, jewelry or tattoos. As medical consultant, he also maintains close contact with pathologists like Dr. Pavlos Pavlidis. Dr. Pavlidis works in northern Greece where many migrants have died trying to cross the river Everos, which forms a natural border with Turkey. I have respect from these dead people and I want the families to take the body in their country. For these people I work in the last 15 years, from 2000. All these years we have about 334 dead bodies. My work is to find the reason of death and I make identification from these people because from all these people we have documents, we have nothing. This is our problem, identification. Dr. Pavlos Pavlidis collects the belongings and DNA of all deceased migrants in the hope of being able to identify them one day. He shares all this data with the ICRC and the Hellenic Red Cross. Cross-checking has made it possible to identify around one-third of the 334 bodies under Dr. Pavlidis' care. Most of the dead were from Syria, Afghanistan or Pakistan. For me, the International Electric Cross will have contact with these families. It's very important for me to have a close contact with the International Electric Cross because people, they don't know me but they know the International Electric Cross. I give information, they give me information and we have a result. For insects and fortunate cases don't usually go together. When we have a successful, let's say, case it means we can prove that someone is indeed dead and buried there, for example. It's not a happy ending but it is an ending. I think the family can start mourning, they can have closure. It's better than the alternative which is not knowing ever what happened to your family. Without this mourning process, the family have to live other life with what is called, this is a concept developed by Pauline Bose, the ambiguous loss. Not being sure that your relative is dead, is dead or is here alive is to live between two realities, the reality of thinking that this person will never come back but still hoping that he will maybe come back, like two universes parallel. This is very painful, very difficult for the families and which is why we are pushing so much to develop all this technique of having a common comparison of post-mortem data and anti-mortem data to maximize the possibility of getting matches, results between family looking for relative presumed dead and dead body unidentified such as those here behind me.