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Migrants trying to leave from the west African country of Mauritania say they are suffering brutal and inhumane treatment at the hands of security forces funded by the European Union. The migrants are trying to make the perilous 700-mile voyage to Europe, and every year, thousands die on the way as they crowd into flimsy and overcrowded wooden boats.
The EU is paying Mauritania's border forces to stop the migrants from going to Europe in the first place. NPR's Ruth Sherlock spoke to one young man who says he witnessed the abuses firsthand.
RUTH SHERLOCK, BYLINE: Abdramane Barry (ph) left Sierra Leone in 2023 with a dream of making it to Europe. Instead, he's now penniless, stripped of his passport and possessions, stranded in north Africa and traumatized by what he's been through.
ABDRAMANE BARRY: The place where they take us to, there is no, you know, good food, no water, no medication. A lot of pregnant women are in there. No. Oh, God.
SHERLOCK: He's telling me about his experience in Mauritania after he and about 80 other people were caught trying to board a smuggler's boat. The police put them into a center so crowded there wasn't space to move.
BARRY: That one, I would say, is more than a prison because the prisoner, you would give him food three times a day. The water, he will take a shower. But that place? No, no, no. Nothing good there.
SHERLOCK: He says they survived only on scraps of rice thrown to them in the morning. A liter of water had to be shared between 15 people. Even the pregnant women in the group, he says, weren't given any extra food. The guards targeted young girls.
BARRY: Call them, take them out. Nobody knows where they take them to, alone (ph).
SHERLOCK: Barry's account tallies with the testimonies of hundreds of migrants collected in a yearslong research by Human Rights Watch and published in a report last week.
LAUREN SEIBERT: We documented, unfortunately, a whole slew of abuses that migrants have faced there.
SHERLOCK: Lauren Seibert is a researcher in the Refugee and Migrant Rights Division at Human Rights Watch.
SEIBERT: These abuses included arbitrary arrest, arbitrary detention, extortion and even some cases of rape and torture. Over the course of several years, while these abuses were ongoing, the EU and Spain bilaterally just continued to outsource their migration management.
SHERLOCK: It's a similar situation, she says, to the deals the EU has cut with Libya and Tunisia, where the terrible abuse of migrants at the hands of security forces are well documented. The European Commission turned down our request for interview but shared a statement saying it takes allegations of mistreatment seriously. It said ensuring respect for the human rights of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers are fundamental principles of its work.
Mauritania and the EU have made efforts this year to improve the treatment of migrants. But Abdramane Barry, the 24-year-old from Sierra Leone, says he saw no sign of this.
BARRY: These people treating us like we are animals. No.
SHERLOCK: Barry and the other migrants were expelled from Mauritania with no legal process. They were pushed into Mali, a country at war. Now he's there in Timbuktu, with only the clothes on his back. For NPR, Malian journalist Baba Toure (ph) meets Barry at a local market where he was begging for food and help. He connects me to him by phone.
How does it make you feel about Europe that the European Union is paying those police to stop people coming to Europe?
BARRY: It make me feel like I think those people, they are not well trained 'cause if they are well trained, they will not treat a human being like this. I'm not a criminal. I'm not deserve that type of treatment. If not me, all the kids and the pregnant women in there, they are not deserve that.
SHERLOCK: Barry says all he wants now is to go home. But stripped of his money, phone and passport in Mauritania, he has no idea how he'll make the more than 1,000-mile-long journey back to Sierra Leone.
Ruth Sherlock, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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