Rights to life during migration in and from West Africa: the role of policies and narrative frames

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates how policies on migration in West Africa and from the region to Europe address and frame migrants’ deaths and right to life in general and actions recommended in objective 8 of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in particular. The paper is based on an analysis of West African national, as well as African and (West) African-European transnational policy and strategy documents. It finds that while the adoption of GCM objective 8 has contributed to slightly increase policy attention to migrants’ deaths and right to life, narrative frames have been key for the justification of how the six actions recommended in the objective have been addressed and implemented at the national, regional, and transregional levels. African policy documents supporting human right-oriented narrative frames have tended to include more comprehensive provisions, and European Union-(West) African policy documents supporting deterrence-oriented frames have tended to include less provisions.KEYWORDS: Narrative framesright to lifedeathsWest AfricaEurope AcknowledgementsAuthors wish to thank Andrea García Borja, Marta Sanchez Dionis and Julia Black for insightful discussions and advice. They would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.Disclosure statementThe authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Wilfried Coly works on IOM’s Missing Migrants Project.Notes1 https://missingmigrants.iom.int/ (Accessed 25 July 2023). The MMP gathers information from different sources, including official records, reports by the media and non-governmental organisations, and interviews with migrants. However, several challenges hinder collection of data on migrant deaths, including difficulties of finding bodies in remote areas and inconsistent reporting. In addition, the MMP only records data on migrants dying during international migration journeys; it does not record data on deaths in detention facilities or refugee camps, after deportation, within countries of origin and at destination. Consequently, actual numbers of migrant deaths are likely to be much higher.2 West African states considered in this paper are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. These states are all ECOWAS member states.3 See for example: Europe’s Deadly Border Policies | Human Rights Watch (hrw.org); Over 100 deaths at sea in one week as European States look away (Accessed 28 January 2023)