European Migrant Death Database – Deaths at the Borders of Southern Europe

VU University Amsterdam has released a border death database documenting migrant deaths along the Southern European borders.

Here is a web post from DIIS (Danish Institute for International Studies) describing the project: “On 12 May 2015, researchers of VU University Amsterdam released a border death database, based on official death records of migrants who died at the Southern European borders in the years 1990-2013. They suggest that European states continue to collect such data supervised by a new European Migrant Death Observatory which is should be part of the Council of Europe.

The database contains individualized information on 3.188 people who died while attempting to reach southern EU countries from the Balkans, the Middle East, and North & West Africa, and whose bodies were found in or brought to Europe. It is unique because it includes – where known – date and place of death, cause of death, gender, age, country of origin, and whether or not the person was identified. Over the past year, 13 researchers visited 563 local civil registries in Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta and Gibraltar and collected information from death certificates. “This database underlines decades of indifference of European states. They had this information all the time, but failed to collect it”, says Professor Thomas Spijkerboer.

The database can be accessed through www.borderdeaths.org

It includes:
o Full database
o Visualization
o Documentary Counting. The Human Costs of Border Control (Pieter Boeles, 2014) about the research project
o Papers on (1) how was the data collected; (2) preliminary findings; (3) identification; (4) policy relevance”

See also: The short documentary Counting the Human Cost of Border Control, in which Thomas Spijkerboer and Tamara Last (Migration Law, VU University Amsterdam) search for traces of those who have died in the civil registries along the Mediterranean coast.