The Border Graves Investigation, a cross-border project that confirmed over 1,000 unmarked graves of migrants over the last ten years across Europe, has been shortlisted for the IJ4EU Impact Award, organised by Investigative Journalism for Europe, a fund that supports cross-border watchdog journalism in and around the European Union.
One of the stories produced as part of the Border Graves was Barbara Matejcic’s investigation ‘Nomen Nescio: Dying En Route to Europe, Buried Without a Name’, which was published on BIRN’s flagship outlet Balkan Insight.
“People are losing their lives in various ways trying to reach the European Union. Our team of eight freelance journalists in the countries on the external borders of the European Union wanted to investigate how these deaths occur, especially when they are the result of the EU border regime – pushbacks and police violence in Croatia, for example,” said Matejcic.
“We investigated what happens to the bodies, what is the identification process, burial and whether the families find out what happened to their loved ones. We worked for six months in Greece, Italy, Spain, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Poland and Lithuania,” she added.
During their work on this investigation, the team found out there was little information and a lot of ambiguity about unidentified dead migrants, and they came across a lot of obstacles.
“There is no official data at the national levels let alone a unique EU database of dead and missing persons. That’s why we did a lot of fieldwork visiting cemeteries and collecting data,” explained Matejcic.
“Also, we exposed that identification is often incomplete and information about the deceased is difficult to obtain for relatives, which is why many never find out what happened to their loved ones and where their burial place is,” she added.
The project’s cross-border team confirmed 1,015 unmarked graves of migrants in 65 cemeteries buried over the last ten years across Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta, Poland, Lithuania, France, and Croatia.
The IJ4EU Impact Award award honours excellence in collaborative journalism in Europe. An independent jury chaired by Maltese journalist Paul Caruana Galizia will choose three winning teams.
Winners will be announced on September 26, at the end of IJ4EU’s UNCOVERED Conference, hosted this year by the iMEdD International Journalism Forum in Athens, Greece. Each winner will receive 5,000 euros.