“In October 2013, Italy captured international headlines when a boat carrying hundreds of asylum seekers sunk off its coast, killing over 360 people. The incident reflects the tremendous increase in African migration to Europe in recent years, in part due to the Arab Spring. While Africans have been migrating to Europe for decades, the instability across North Africa and the Sahel, coupled with the erosion of Libya’s capacity to control its own borders, has resulted in an unprecedented surge of migrants to Italy in recent years. This surge shows no signs of subsiding.

It is estimated that in 80 percent of these cases, the journey is “facilitated” by migrant smugglers and criminal groups that who provides a range of services such as transportation, fraudulent identification, corruption of border officials and settlement services. Smugglers in transit countries coordinate with smugglers in source countries to act as guides, escorting individuals across the Sahara Desert, heading towards the coast. Although some smuggling networks are organized criminal structures, many are loosely linked chains of individuals, which make it challenging for authorities to dismantle.

“Smuggled futures: the dangerous path of a migrant from Africa to Europe” is the latest research report of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime explores motivations, methods and impacts of the increasingly potent and lucrative business of migrant smuggling from Africa to Europe”.

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Recently, given the recent global coverage around the tragic deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime has been well-placed to make a contribution, thanks to his work both of the field and behind the scenes.

 

 

Associated Press  

 

 

See the full report here.

Source : the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime