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Mauritania: Years of Migration Control Abuses
HRW, 27 August 2025
EU, Spain Support Fueled Crackdowns, Ignored Abuses; Reforms Beginning Read more »
Human Rights Watch reported that between 2020 and early 2025, Mauritanian security forces committed widespread abuses against migrants and asylum seekers, mainly from West and Central Africa. These abuses included torture, rape, arbitrary detention, inhumane conditions, and mass expulsions.
The 142-page report, "They Accused Me of Trying to Go to Europe," detailed violations by police, coastguard, gendarmerie, navy, and army, mostly during border and migration operations. HRW said that the European Union and Spain worsened the situation by outsourcing migration control to Mauritania. HRW found tens of thousands were expelled to unsafe border areas without fair legal processes. Detention centers were overcrowded and unsanitary, with some children held with unrelated adults.
Mauritania denied claims of systematic violations, and it pointed to recent reforms. These included a ban on collective expulsions and new operating procedures introduced in May 2025 to improve protections.
Racial and ethnic profiling, extortion, mass arrests, detention for days or weeks with little to no food, collective expulsions, beatings and torture: these are just some of the violations migrants, asylum seekers, and others have experienced over the past several years at the hands of security forces in the context of border and migration control in Mauritania, a country in northwest Africa. Meanwhile, those same forces have continued to receive financial and material support from the European
see more »Mauritania: EU Urged to Uphold Human Rights, as Mauritania Accused of Abuse of Migrants
RFI, 27 August 2025
Mauritania’s role as a key transit hub for African migrants seeking passage to Europe has come into sharp focus, following renewed claims by the NGO Human Rights Watch of… Read more »
Mauritania: EU Urged to Uphold Human Rights, As Mauritania Accused of Abuse of Migrants
RFI, 27 August 2025
Mauritania's role as a key transit hub for African migrants seeking passage to Europe has come into sharp focus, following renewed claims by the NGO Human Rights Watch of abuse by… Read more »
Mauritania: Spain and Mauritania Agree Deals to Stem Flow of Illegal Migrants
RFI, 28 August 2024
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani announced a series of agreements on Wednesday aimed at stemming a surge in migrants… Read more »
More than 12, 000 migrants from Africa disembarked on the Spanish archipelago between January and March this year, according to reports. That number represents a stark increase from around 2000 that arrived in the Canary Islands about the same time last year. Over 80% of the boats that carried the migrants departed from Mauritania or "transited through its waters".
Migrants from the Central Sahel and
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Two men near a wooden boat known as a pirogue, traditionally used for fishing in Mauritania and West Africa, on a beach in Nouakchott, Mauritania, June 28, 2022. Pirogues have been frequently used by migrants seeking to cross the Atlantic Ocean to reach Spain’s Canary Islands. Lauren Seibert/Human Rights Watch
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