By Ya Awa Touray
The Director of Diaspora and Migration Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Musa Camara led a delegation to the first ever meeting about missing migrants on the migratory routes of West and North Africa by state and non-state actors. The meeting was held in Tunisia from 24th to 26th May 2022.
The delegation comprises: Mrs Fanta Bojang Samateh Manneh, Deputy Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Interior; Mrs Kumba Jow, Curator of Interstate Estate, Ministry of Justice; and Mr Alasan Senghore, Secretary General of The Gambia Red Cross Society.
The meeting was organised by the International Community of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR).
A large number of migrants go missing on route through countries of sub-Saharan West Africa, the Sahel and Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. Some may be alive, unable to communicate; others die on land and at sea. In both cases, their relatives suffer painful uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones.
While an effective effort to address the fate of missing migrants requires regional cooperation along migratory routes, it needs to start with a clarification of the existing national capacities and relevant institutional, legal and policy frameworks of each concerned state.
To this purpose, a joint approach in the recording of missing migrant cases, search procedures, the recovery, documentation and identification of unidentified human remains and the provision of support to concerned families is paramount.
It was against this backdrop that countries along the migratory routes of West and North Africa and other stakeholders had a 3-day forum to jointly devise strategies to identify challenges and proffer solutions to achieving transnational collaboration amongst nation states and other stakeholders in tracing and recording missing migrants and giving support to their families. The forum centered on what is required to start transnational collaboration, vis-à-vis regional and bilateral mechanisms for the search and identification of missing migrants.