Unwanted, Unnoticed: an audit of 160 asylum and immigration-related deaths in Europe • 16 died as a result of destitution – eight in France, four in Greece, three in Spain and one in Ireland – either through accidents or illness caused by having to live on the streets or in derelict buildings. reception systems in these countries, which combine enforced dependency with institutionalised inhumanity. In southern Europe there were more deaths from the effects of destitution and from untreated illness. • 9 died2 after direct contact with police or security officials, both privatised and state-employed. These deaths occurred within detention centres, police stations, during deportation, in homes or on the street, and were the result of beatings, restraint or shooting. There is a lack of information surrounding thirty-two of the recorded deaths.3 In at least thirteen cases, death is ascribed to ‘natural causes’, with no further information; in other cases there may be circumstantial or disputed evidence pointing to neglect or brutality on the part of staff in detention centres, or to the stress of detention and impending deportation, exacerbating pre-existing conditions – but such evidence is rarely investigated. • 4 died during police chases or immigration raids, in accidents, or, afraid of being arrested, by throwing themselves from highstorey buildings. • 4 (including a ten-year-old child) died, all in Germany, because of the dangerous location of accommodation camps and authorities’ refusal to mitigate the dangers. They were all hit by trains on railway tracks they were forced to cross to get to shops, and safety measures to protect camp residents were consistently refused. There were two accidental deaths in Norwegian reception centres, about which we have no further information. • 2 were killed by violent room- or cellmates, whose psychological problems were untreated, ignored or punished (one in Germany, one in Switzerland). There were three more deaths by homicide (all in reception centres in Norway) about which we have no further information. • 2 died violently in their country of origin after their deportation following refusal of asylum (from Belgium and Ireland). Some tentative observations can be made from these cases. We can say, for example, that in northern Europe – Germany, the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Norway, more people died at their own hands than from any other single cause. This may be linked with the highly regulated and bureaucratised asylum In too many cases, those who die are unidentified. Sometimes only a nationality ­ and an age are recorded, sometimes not even that. None of the twenty-three who died in Norway’s reception centres are identified, and we know the names of only four of the eighteen who died, mostly in direct provision hostels, in Ireland in the past five years. Eight of those who died in Greece are unidentified, seven of the dead in France, eleven of those who died in Germany. In such cases, the dead are in a very literal sense ‘unmournable’. The difficulty we have had assembling even the amount of information we have testifies to the opacity of systems for recording deaths across Europe. There appears to be no publicly accessible register anywhere in Europe, for example, of those who die in circumstances engaging state responsibility (in detention, reception or accommodation centres, in asylum hostels or at the hands of state agents or their private proxies). Yet states have duties under international human rights law, not just to protect life and prevent those deaths that are preventable, but also to investigate deaths for which their responsibility is engaged, transparently and in a way that bereaved families can fully participate, so as to learn how their loved one died. Most EU states are not even at first base when it comes to recording and investigating migrants’ deaths. Even in Ireland, with its inquest system, there is no transparency. If IRR | European Research Progamme Briefing No. 10 5