An investigation by a consortium of international media outlets found that EU support and financing has been used by North African countries—in this case, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania—in clandestine operations to detain tens of thousands of African migrants and dump them in the desert or remote border areas to prevent them from traveling on to the EU. (Washington Post)
Our Take
The fact that several North African governments have been involved in operations like this is not a revelation. In 2018, Leila Beratto wrote for WPR about how Algerian authorities had been expelling African migrants by dumping them at the country’s borders with Niger and Mali since 2014. Numerous reports over the past decade have revealed similar operations in Tunisia, Morocco, Libya and across the region.
It is also no secret that for much of the past decade the EU and individual European nations have turned to foreign governments to outsource the containment of irregular migration to Europe. Amid the migrant and refugee crisis in 2015, the EU signed a deal with Turkey in an effort to contain Syrian refugees to a “safe third country,” and Brussels has since signed migration agreements with several North African countries, including Libya.