Migratory deaths, missing persons and their identification

On Thursday 11 January 2024 at 6.30pm, we welcomed artist Rachid Koraïchi, forensic anthropologist Jose-Pablo Baraybar and anthropologists Filippo Furri and Silvia Di Meo for a round table discussion on missing and dead migrants and their identification.
 
The Mediterranean has become a graveyard for migrants; it is estimated that more than 26,000 people have died since 2014 while attempting to cross from North Africa to Europe. Many others have died at Europe's borders: in the Balkans, in the Pas-de-Calais, in the Channel towards England and in the Atlantic Ocean towards the Canaries. Many of the bodies are never found, and of those that are, most are not identified.
 
Faced with this significant increase in anonymous deaths, our guests have joined forces to give these bodies a chance of one day being identified and treated with dignity. The aim is also to help families find their missing loved ones, to give them the opportunity to begin mourning and to take the administrative steps that require a death certificate. They will tell us about their work, the importance they attach to it, the obstacles they encounter and the role they see for an organisation like Médecins Sans Frontières in this work of tracing the identities of dead migrants.

José Pablo Baraybar is a Peruvian forensic anthropologist. He worked for 30 years as an expert for the United Nations, the inter-American system and Peru. He is currently forensic coordinator for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Mexico and Central America, having worked on the identification of migrants who have died or disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea.

Silvia Di Meo is an anthropologist and researcher at the University of Genova. She is president of the Mem-Med Mémoire Méditerranée association (based between Sicily and Tunisia), which works to find missing persons and provides legal and psychosocial support to the families of migrants who have died or disappeared on the borders of the Mediterranean.
 
Filippo Furri is an anthropologist. He began working on the issue of deaths in migration in 2011 with the Migreurop network and the Boats4people coalition, with whom he produced a guide to support families searching for missing relatives. He takes part in university research programmes (Mecmi with Carolina Kobelinsky in particular) and has also worked on the search for and identification of bodies with the ICRC and EuroMed Rights and joined the CommemorAction network.
 
Rachid Koraïchi is an Algerian visual artist who graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Algiers and the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In 2021, he created "Jardin d'Afrique" in Zarzis, Tunisia, a garden-cemetery for migrants who died at sea, work on which began in 2018. There are also buildings on the site where autopsies can be performed to help identify the remains.

The conference, which brought to a close a day of internal reflection on MSF's role in relation to migrant populations, was led by Sarah Chateau, Head of Programmes at MSF.

Here some pictures of the "Jardin d'Afrique" made by Rachid Koraïchi :