The Nador-Melilla Border Trap

On 24 June 2022, some two thousand migrants attempted to cross the border fence separating the city of Nador, in the northeast of Morocco, from the Spanish-controlled enclave of Melilla. The violent repression inflicted on them by Moroccan and Spanish law enforcement agents turned the Barrio Chino border crossing into a death trap and resulted in a mass grave. The Moroccan authorities have acknowledged 23 deaths, but according to the Moroccan Human Rights Association in Nador at least 27 people were killed, and more than 70 remain disappeared to this day. What happened on 24 June 2022? How and by whom was the Barrio Chino border post turned into a death trap? 

To answer these questions, for more than a year Border Forensics investigated with Irídia-Center for the Defense of Human Rights and the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), as well as other civil society actors on both sides of the border. Furthermore, we benefited from the additional advice of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR). By articulating our analysis of the massacre across different spatial and temporal scales, we attempted to understand not only the sequence of events and the practices of the actors present on 24 June 2022, but also the structural conditions that made the massacre possible, and the political conjuncture that shaped this extreme intensity of violence. We also analysed the violence that continued after 24 June, through the failure to identify the deceased and the disappeared, the impunity for the massacre, and the judicial harassment against the migrants themselves. Full report available here.

Images: stills from the video report published by Border Forensics, 2024

Team

Charles Heller - Research Director
Elsa Tyszler (Associate Researcher at CRESPPA, CNRS) - Lead Researcher
Elio Panese - Project Coordinator
Nico Alexandroff - Cartography & Animations
Jack Isles - Cartography & Animations
Svitlana Lavrenchuk - Cartography & Animations
Stanislas Michel - Geostatistical Analysis
Rossana Padeletti - Geolocation & Remote Sensing
Frédéric Choffat - Film Editing
Jelka Kretzschmar -  Communications