Documenting the Unidentified Graves of Migrants in Europe’s Borderlands

This investigation sought to answer key questions that no government could answer: What happens when someone goes missing at Europe’s borders? And how many burial sites are there across Europe?

Article by Joanna Demarco for GIJN

Graves of unidentified persons buried at a cemetery near the village of Sidiro in northern Greece. Image: Courtesy of Daphne Tolis

Multimedia journalist Tina Xu was taken aback the first time she came across an unmarked grave of a migrant in Lesbos – a Greek island and a main arrival point for people crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.

“It left a very deep impression on me… some [graves] have stones that just say ‘unidentified’, some have stones with no markings at all. Some have no gravestone, it’s just a rock… and then some have no rock at all, it’s just a stick,” she tells GIJN.

“So when I saw that, I began thinking ‘people’s last memories are here. If relatives come searching for them, how would they even know?’”

The question led Xu to team up with multimedia and investigative journalist Gabriela Ramírez, and soon formed a transnational team of journalists that spanned some of Europe’s most deadly borders, and began applying for grants to investigate the issue.

These were the main questions the team sought to answer: How many of these graves are there across Europe? What happens to someone who goes missing at Europe’s borders? What about their families?

Grim Discovery

Together, the team identified 1,015 unmarked graves in 65 cemeteries across the past 10 years, located in Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta, Poland, Lithuania, France, and Croatia. Each unmarked grave represents a person who lost their life en route to Europe.

Their thorough and visually striking investigative reporting on unmarked migrant graves, Europe’s systemic neglect, and the human cost of the situation, was published in 10 countries across 20 outlets. Journalismfund Europe and IJ4EU provided funding, while the Limelight Foundation supported Unbias the News to publish the investigations. The investigation and its stories were recognized, honored, and awarded multiple times throughout 2024: by the European Press Prize, the IJ4EU Impact Award, and the Lorenzo Natali Prize.

The Border Graves investigation team at the European Press Prize ceremony: (Left to right) Gabriela Ramírez, Gabriele Cruciata, Tina Xu, Eoghan Gilmartin, Barbara Matejčić, Kristiana Ludwig, Daphne Tolis, Leah Pattem. Image: Courtesy of European Press Prize

GIJN spoke to Xu and Ramírez about what the eight-month, cross-border investigation entailed, what it revealed, and what they learned in the process.

The Border Graves Investigation team consisted of Barbara Matejčić, Daphne Tolis, Danai Maragoudaki, Eoghan Gilmartin, Gabriela Ramírez, Gabriele Cruciata, Leah Pattem, and was coordinated by Tina Xu. The team also collaborated with the journalists Kristiana Ludwig and Benjamin Heubl at Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Felicity Lawrence, Ashifa Kassam, Lorenzo Tondo, Manisha Ganguly, and Pamela Duncan at the Guardian.

Filling The Void Left by Institutions

Initially, the team expected the project to involve a lot of satellite imagery analysis. However, this was not possible, partly because many graves were vertical or covered by forests and so could not be identified from the birds-eye angle offered by satellites. This realization caused the team to have to change course shortly after the investigation began.

They soon became aware of another glaring obstacle: official data about unidentified graves across the countries was non-existent.

“No one is counting the number of unmarked graves… no government institution, no large NGO,” Xu explains.

The inability to obtain any official data or rely on satellite imagery analysis left the team with no choice but to resort to “on the ground and traditional journalism.”

To move forward, the journalists began compiling a list of NGOs, contact persons, cemetery locations, and any other important information they could come across through desk research. They sought the help of grassroots organizations and citizens, then turned to field work and in situ research.

The team soon realized that citizens and small organizations had stepped in to fill the void left by government and institutions, finding and recording identities of deceased migrants and connecting to their families. By working closely with these civic-minded individuals and small groups, the team was able to conduct their investigation.

In Spain, Caminando Fronteras, an organization that works to help people search for their missing loved ones, linked the team to families. Comitato 3 Ottobre in Italy took the journalists around to grave sites across Sicily and invited the reporters to the annual gathering of family members of victims of the October 3 shipwreck in Lampedusa.

In the Balkans, a man named Nihad Suljić who runs a Facebook page named Dead and Missing in the Balkans took the reporters to grave sites along the border. Similar collaboration was done with POPH in Poland, Sienos Group in Lithuania, and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Croatia.

Journalist Tina Xu operating a drone at a Muslim cemetery in Bohoniki, Poland, on the Poland-Belarus border. Image: Courtesy of Gabriela Ramírez.

The journalists visited well over five dozen cemeteries in total, and the methods to obtain information differed from country to country, cemetery to cemetery. For example, in Croatia, municipalities were very responsive to the team. But there was a total lack of recordkeeping at other cemeteries and radio silence from many local governments in Italy.

“We tried to find data at all of these different levels. At European levels there is none. At national levels there is none, at city levels there is none… so our last resort is to turn to small village governments, funeral parlors, or the grave keepers themselves, or the coroners.”

In fact, the journalists on the team deem their data findings as one of the investigations’s most important achievements, in that it created a documentary record where none previously existed.

Having to resort to this type of reporting to find answers also made the investigation much more costly and time consuming; the funding deadline needed to be moved and the team surpassed their allocated budget. However, the journalists were determined to report on the situation in their region in the best way possible. In order to go deeper, additional work had to be undertaken at the reporters’ own personal expense, a reality that freelance journalists often confront.

For Ramírez, who had relatives migrating from Venezuela to the United States, working on this story felt personal. Putting herself in the shoes of the families of these migrants, she deemed it vital to discover more about the situation from this perspective.

“It was also (about) understanding the issues,” she says. “What makes it so difficult for families to find their relatives? What are the steps they usually follow to find news about a missing person?”

With the help of the local organizations, and through social media searches, the team members managed to track down and speak to families of people who were unidentified, missing and deceased. They spoke to people whose loved ones left for Europe from Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iraqi Kurdistan, Algeria, and Sri Lanka. They spoke to the families about the serious structural hurdles faced by the families when searching for and, if found, burying a body.

Unearthing Systemic Neglect Across the Board

Each journalist delved into their own region’s situation, but the team’s combined reporting painted a larger picture of neglect not only on a local level, but also, collectively, on a European level.

Journalists in Greece found that funeral homes are asked to conduct rushed burials without proper paperwork, and in Italy, graves were being exhumed and moved from the cemetery illegally. Reporting in Poland found the case of someone who was buried in an unidentified grave despite having a passport.

The lack of coordination among EU countries and the failure to handle migrants’ remains properly exposed systemic neglect, despite a 2021 European Commission resolution calling for a coordinated approach to respectfully caring for and identifying unknown migrant remains.

There was no formal response from the EU following the investigation. However, one impactful moment occurred when Ramírez’s reporting in Lithuania prompted a successful crowdfunding campaign by a local NGO, which decided to take the case of one of her story subjects to the European Court of Human Rights.

Strength in a Team

With online cross-border investigations still relatively new, journalists continue to navigate the do’s and don’ts of working within this context. Ramírez tells GIJN that this investigation taught the team the importance of communication and clarifying details, such as crediting on publications, beforehand.

Ramírez and Xu also agree that having a team made up of local journalists or journalists who are familiar with their regions was a key factor in the success of their transnational project. Their collaboration was also important when taking into consideration the sensitive subject matter of the investigation. Their weekly calls became vital points of processing and sharing what they were experiencing throughout the work as they dealt with the gravity of the story.