The Regional Meeting on Migration in the Mediterranean, held in Rabat on 21 and 22 May 2026, provided a valuable space for dialogue, experience-sharing, and collective resistance.
Organised by EuroMed Rights, the event brought together families of missing persons, civil society activists, lawyers, forensic experts, and journalists from across the Euro-Mediterranean region. The shared objective was to break the silence surrounding migration tragedies and to define clear strategies built around three fundamental pillars: truth, accountability, and justice.
Over the course of the two days, participants highlighted the scale of the failures in addressing disappearances along migration routes: insufficient search and rescue operations, obstacles to the work of NGOs, difficulties in identifying bodies, lack of cooperation between States, and the absence of adequate mechanisms to support families of missing persons and guarantee their right to the truth.
Against a backdrop of increasing externalisation of European borders and the militarisation of migration routes, both at sea and on land, migrants are being pushed onto increasingly deadly pathways, in both the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara Desert. Participants strongly denounced State inaction, the criminalisation of migrants and their defenders, and the invisibilisation of the specific forms of violence experienced by women and children. Beyond documenting these realities, the meeting was strongly action-oriented through four thematic workshops. These sessions laid the groundwork for concrete and operational recommendations:
Workshop 1 highlighted the need to professionalise and better structure cross-border investigative journalism, drawing on ethical charters (the Rome Charter and the Marseille Charter) and close collaboration with NGOs.
Workshop 2 highlighted the psychologically and administratively challenging journey faced by families of missing persons, stressing the need to centralise their knowledge and create mutual support networks.
Workshop 3 explored the various legal avenues for establishing State responsibility for migration-related disappearances, focusing on litigation before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and UN mechanisms. Discussions also examined ways to challenge border externalisation policies and bilateral agreements that contribute to systemic violations of the rights of migrants and their families.
Workshop 4 put forward seven urgent forensic recommendations, including the creation of a cross-border Ante-Mortem/Post-Mortem database, the establishment of a humanitarian visa, and the guarantee of dignified and traceable burials.
In conclusion, the Rabat meeting reaffirmed that migrant disappearances are not an inevitable tragedy but the direct consequence of security-driven political choices. To address this issue, participants called for a unified cross-border mobilisation that places human dignity and the rights of families at the centre of all future actions.
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