Advocacy & research

Sienos Grupė

Lithuania

July 2024

Since 2021, Sienos Grupė has been the primary locally-founded actor combating border violence and systemic discrimination against migrants in Lithuania. This year, they opened a vibrant interfaith, intercultural community centre in the heart of Vilnius, designed to foster connection, solidarity, and capacity through holistic well-being events for migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers; political education workshops; and direct legal and health services. Their ongoing work also includes closely monitoring the cases of human rights violations at the borders, building and activating Lithuanian civil society’s solidarity with migrants, and advocating at legislative and electoral levels for progressive policy change.

Free El Hiblu 3

Malta

2024

Abdalla, Amara and Kader are three young migrants at the center of the local, EU-wide, and global advocacy campaign “Free El Hiblu 3”, as their life-saving efforts on their route to Europe have resulted in entrapment in the anti-migration legal system. The case of El Hiblu 3 illuminates a systemic European policy of deterring migration, which must be replaced with the empowerment of safety and solidarity. The El Hiblu 3 have been recognized by the pope, with Amnesty International and other international human rights organisations calling for their acquittal due to the wrongful scapegoating of migrants.

Recent wins such as the freedom of the Pylos 9 – migrants criminalized at random following a shipwreck in Greek coasts – demonstrate the significance of movement lawyering, and how these cases set important legal precedents dismantling repressive EU migration policies, brick by brick.

Border Violence Monitoring Network

Balkan region

2024

Border Violence Monitoring Network includes 13+ grassroots organisations working together to document human rights violations along the Balkan migration route and bringing these injustices to light through a multi-level advocacy strategy at national, European, and UN levels. The network seeks to consolidate its monitoring activities at the borders, make cases and testimonies of border violence visible and open-source through monthly audited reports, and build an effective joint strategy to address criminalisation and the malpractices of ‘managing’ migration flows at borders in this region. It is currently building the first ever legal database in this region, addressing how advocacy efforts must be conjoined with effective research and a focused litigation strategy.

KlikAktiv

Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania

2024

KlikAktiv empowers and supports people on the move in Croatia, Hungary, Romania, and 6 different locations across Serbia, as the latter is the final non-EU country on the Balkan migration route. More than 95% of people on the move in Serbia do not have access to the asylum and protection system, but are sleeping in informal squats instead with little access to independent humanitarian aid and information about their basic legal rights. KlikAktiv is currently the only independent movement lawyering and monitoring project in the region, impacting 10 000+ migrants a year.

Through its work at the external EU borders, KlikAktiv’s team collects and publishes participatory testimonies on border violence for strategic litigation and civil advocacy, documenting and analysing the regional impact with a coalition of other actors. These advocacy interventions are especially significant given the pan-European border guard Frontex’s increasing presence and the new repressive EU pact on asylum and migration.

Solidary Wheels

Spain

2024

Solidary Wheels is a non-hierarchical, women-led organisation bridging the gap between a formal legal entitlement to claim asylum and the administrative reality in the only land borders from Africa to Europe: Melilla and Ceuta. Taking a feminist and decolonial approach, the collective focuses especially on advocating for the rights of migrants facing multiple marginalisations. It connects impacted people with movement lawyers, offers social and holistic well-being support, provides close accompaniment throughout administrative procedures, and monitors human rights violations for policy transformation.

Solidarity Wheels sustains the building blocks of resilient movements in this region through its dual pillars of providing informational workshops and activity-based social events to build coalition and activate civil society.

Arci Porco Rosso

Italy

2024

"From Sea to Prison" is an activist project in Palermo that works with and for people criminalized for having driven themselves and others across Italy's maritime border. It monitors the systematic arrest of people upon arrival in Italy, as well as their trials and sentencing. The project provides social-legal support to people in prison and after release, and advocates against the criminalization of freedom of movement. Working with local and transnational networks, it reports on the legal and political developments in the criminalization of people on the move, both in Italy and beyond.

The project involves a wide group of people – some of whom were also previously imprisoned and have since become part of the local community – and maintains regular contact with prisoners via letter, writing in a range of languages including Arabic, English, Farsi, Italian, Russian and Turkish. Carried out by the collective and community space ‘Porco Rosso’ in Palermo, and in collaboration with the NGO borderline-europe, its activists bring together a diverse set of knowledge and life experiences, finding connection through the common struggle for freedom of movement.

I Have Rights and Homo Digitalis

Greece

2024

Based on the Greek island of Samos, I Have Rights is an essential actor working towards systemic change through strategic litigation while closely monitoring, documenting, and advocating against human rights violations, in particular on the Samos Closed Controlled Access Centre, a “pilot” refugee camp which has been denounced by Amnesty International for degrading, inhumane conditions. In collaboration with Homo Digitalis, a Greek civil society organisation dedicated to the protection of digital rights, freedom of expression, and non-discrimination, they’re building on an unprecedented win: the Hellenic Data Protection Authority has fined the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum for data protection violations in Closed Controlled Access Centres. Through participatory research and litigation they are holding the Greek government accountable, monitoring the implementation of the decision and ensuring its enforcement to demand real, lasting change.

Europe Must Act

Pan-European

2021

Beginning in 2020 with a call for radical change from grassroots organisers working in Greece, Europe Must Act has grown into an important civil society movement with local groups in 58 cities across 21 European countries. Its united vision is to build a network of solidarity that can adapt to the changing migration patterns of the 21st century and highlight the malpractice of repressive European migration policies. Its campaigning platform is based on a diversity of combined tactics: a regular blog on migration policy, grassroots reports from Aegean Sea route, participatory “Raising Voices” testimonies of migrants in Greek refugee camps, and building localized structures – #CitiesMustAct – to demonstrate a broad alliance of European civil society in support of safe migration routes and dignified rights for migrants.

Top Manta

Spain

2021

We seeded Top Manta, an initiative created from the streets of Barcelona by and for undocumented migrant workers, a population who arrive following precarious routes to Europe. By reclaiming the racialised Spanish term "manteros," Top Manta functions as a labor union, eco-friendly clothing brand, and pro-Black social movement. It provides tailoring apprenticeships so that migrants can regularise their status, sustainably produce clothing, and foster community resilience, while offering a central infrastructure to connect for legal and social support.

Campaigns offer sharp critique on the systemic discrimination faced by nearly half a million migrants in Spain: the recent campaign “Barcelona or Death” (Barça o Barzakh) works towards international solidarity and climate consciousness around the extractive fishing deals between Spain and Senegal, which have brewed a crisis of displacement. Top Manta also plays a crucial role in migrant-led coalitions, such as the ever-growing Regularisation Ya campaign to advocate at the highest national level for expanded migrant rights.

Community Kitchen

Niger

2021

Community kitchens have always played an important role across mutual aid practices and interconnected fights for food, class, and racial justice. Involving cross-border stakeholders from Niger, Mali, Togo, Morocco, Germany, and Austria, the weekly community kitchen in Agadez, Niger offers a practical solution for migrants who have been stranded. Migrants' struggle for dignified life has become even more precarious due to the global pandemic, exaggerating the globally uneven impacts of health apartheid.

This regular communal space plays many roles: it fosters solidarity and trust between various communities, serves as a hub for developing lived experience leadership, and enhances the organising capacity and holistic well-being of displaced populations. As a crucial support structure and movement-building base, it also collects participatory testimonies of migrants in the systematically overlooked situation in the Sahel-Saharan zone, advancing advocacy efforts across national and international media.

Front-Lex

pan-European

2021

We helped seed front-LEX, which sparks social change by challenging migration policies through movement lawyering before EU (CJEU), European (ECtHR) and International (ICC) Courts. Giving advice and providing pro-bono legal representation to individual and organizational victims of EU migration policies, front-LEX aims to bring about policy change, provide reparations and remedy to people on the move, and hold those responsible to account. Since 2021, the initiative has gained a number of groundbreaking firsts: a human rights case against Frontex, a damages lawsuit of a pushback survivor against Frontex, and reparations for the case of a pushback of an EU citizen.

They continue working with partners and impacted communities on pending cases against European officials implicated with Crimes Against Humanity in connection with EU policy in the Central Mediterranean and Libya (ICC).

Border Forensics

Switzerland, pan-European

2021

We helped seed Border Forensics, a research and advocacy institution that mobilizes innovative methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence. Collaborating with migrant groups and civil society organisations, the aim is to promote and defend the dignity and rights of migrants, and to foster mobility justice. Working across human rights, technology, research, and arts and architecture, Border Forensics produces reports, maps, video reconstructions and other visualizations that ground demands of accountability for the violation of migrants’ rights and support claims for the identification of the deceased.

Findings are presented in national and international courts and people’s tribunals, discussed in parliaments and political assemblies of various kinds, published in the international press and academic journals, and featured in exhibitions and public events.

ReFOCUS Media Labs

pan-European

2020

ReFOCUS Media Labs is dedicated to educating and training refugee citizen journalists, providing unique and fair opportunities for displaced individuals to tell their own stories and reclaim their autonomy within a dominant media landscape that often speaks for them instead of with them. The training is conducted by those directly affected by complex crises. The multi-media content in video, photography, and testimony produced through this initiative is utilised not only by humanitarian organisations like Sea Watch, Human Rights Watch, and One Happy Family Center Lesbos, but also by major news outlets such as the BBC. This approach meaningfully helps build a global network advocating for migrant rights through participatory narrative change.

Civil MRCC

pan-European

2020

The Civil MRCC was created from transnational grassroots activists in response to the malpractice of systematic omissions, delayed interventions, and facilitation of forcible returns in violation of international human rights by European states’ maritime rescue coordination centers (MRCCs). Specifically, it provides a coordination and documentation platform for the fleet of NGOs that have assisted and brought to safety tens of thousands of people across the Central Mediterranean sea since 2014. This coordination includes an app used between civil search and rescue operations, an extensive and regularly updated database to make information more reliable and available to civil society actors, and a live online map of events in the Mediterranean.