Unwanted, Unnoticed: an audit of 160 asylum and immigration-related deaths in Europe PREFACE As part of its project ‘Taking A Stand for reports, is by no means a complete picture Human Dignity’, the IRR’s European Research of all the deaths that have taken place in Programme (ERP) has undertaken the difficult recent years. Our findings are indicative rather task of documenting the deaths of asylum than exhaustive. Over fifty nationalities are seekers and undocumented migrants living covered by the 160 deaths we have listed, in legal limbo inside Europe’s borders. Many though sub-Saharan Africans and those from organisations, and even the Pope, have the Middle East and North Africa are dominant. berated Europe’s leaders for policy failures, Precariousness – of status, of rights, of life’s and a moral attitude of indifference and inertia, essentials – has consequences in terms of which have contributed to the situation where mortality rates. There is an epidemic of suicide thousands of refugees are drowning each year attempts amongst those with unresolved in the Mediterranean Sea. But it is also the case refugee status or without papers. that many migrants and refugees who survive these perilous journeys and reach Europe then After Mohammad Rahsepar, a 29-year-old find themselves living on the margin and dying Iranian torture survivor, committed suicide prematurely and unnecessarily in distressing at an asylum camp in Germany, his friends circumstances that are barely reported. These issued a simple statement, saying he ‘hanged deaths are met with an official indifference himself from the window with his bed sheets which is on a continuum with the moral inertia and ended his struggle to find a way to be behind border deaths. able to live with dignity in a human society’. His friends at the Würzburg asylum centre But then, poor and vulnerable people across understood his pain. It is time for us to stand Europe, are alongside them, addressing the linked issues increasingly ignored by the affluent and the of precarity and the absence of human dignity. irrespective of nationality, powerful. They are, to all intents and purposes, Europe’s non-people – ‘unwanted, unvalued and unnoticed’.1 Liz Fekete Director When the structures created by asylum and immigration systems are added to this mix, societal indifference is entrenched still further. Because migrants who suffer inside Europe are denied access to welfare, entombed within detention centres or forced into a sub-subsistence life at the very margins of society, their deaths are unmournable, or, to use a phrase that one would have hoped would be obsolete, ‘Life unworthy of life’ (Lebensunwertes Leben). But their suffering and their deaths do need to be accounted for. Our list, which relies on newspapers and NGO Notes 1. The phrase was used in an open letter by the Church of England bishops urging congregations to vote, and accusing politicians of celebrating equality while treating the poor and vulnerable as ‘unwanted, unvalued and unnoticed’. Guardian (17 February 2015), available at: http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/feb/17/church-of-england-calls-for-freshmoral-vision-in-british-politics * Front page shows migrant squat in a derelict former factory in Dijon, France (© Joseph Tanner/ UNHCR) IRR | European Research Progamme Briefing No. 10 2