Alexis Okeowo (CRF 2019) recently published a piece in the New Yorker about the tens of thousands of people who have disappeared on their way to Europe. Okeowo spoke with migrants who have endured the passage to Europe or have lost loved ones attempting passage; she also spoke with migrant activists and Cristina Cattaneo, head of the Anthropological and Odontological Lab (labanof) in Milan, who has spent much of her career identifying bodies of missing migrants. Okeowo discusses the need to identify migrant bodies in order to respect the living– and the difficulty of doing so without the support of both European and African governments.
“The missing-migrants crisis [is] not confined to Europe. The remains of hundreds of deceased migrants are found at the U.S.-Mexico border every year, and families rely on volunteers to piece together the fate of loved ones. “Knowing whether your son is dead or not is a fundamental right,” Cattaneo told me. “In other historical periods, the dead were treated with more respect.” She said that she was ready, if necessary, to sue on behalf of family members of the missing: “If the European Parliament, having known all this information, consciously says, ‘We don’t care, we won’t do anything about this,’ then we start the class-action lawsuit.”
Read the full article here.