SOS MEDITERRANEE / Tess Barthes
Yesterday, the team of SOS MEDITERRANEE’s aerial monitoring mission ALBATROSS spotted a dead body floating in the Mediterranean. The sighting in the Libyan Rescue Region comes just days after reports of two mass shipwrecks off Libya and dozens of bodies washing ashore in both the East and Western parts of the country. Five bodies were recovered by the Libyan Coastguard1 and at least 28 washed ashore between Friday, April 17th, and Monday, April 20th.2
However, like for many of those whose bodies are returned by the sea, the identity of the person spotted yesterday, and the circumstances of their death, are unlikely to be established. The ALBATROSS team urged the relevant authorities to recover and identify the deceased and confirm the connection of the sighting to an incident at sea but received no reply.
On January 30, the team onboard Ocean Viking recovered the body of a woman further North in the Maltese Search and Rescue Region of the Central Mediterranean. She was one of the very few people recovered after civil society reports that more than 1,000 people went missing during Cyclone Harry in January.3 The IOM’s Missing Migrants Project was only able to verify reports of 425 people missing, of which the woman recovered by the Ocean Viking is one. While she is thus counted in this devastating statistic, her identity has not been established.
The deadliest start to a year in nearly a decade
Even with IOM figures being, by the organisation’s own account, an undercount, 2026 has seen the deadliest start to a year since 2017. Between 1 January and 22 April 2026, at least 782 people have been recorded dead or missing on the Central Mediterranean route alone – an increase of over 150% compared to the same period last year.
Alongside its published data that has been verified through official, NGO and media sources, IOM maintains a parallel dataset of reported but unverified incidents that are excluded from official figures. This parallel dataset currently contains approximately 400 additional cases for 2026, the majority linked to Cyclone Harry. With climate change intensifying Mediterranean storms, including hurricane-like “medicanes”, extreme weather conditions like those seen earlier this year are likely to become more frequent – making already perilous crossings in unseaworthy boats even more dangerous.
The politics of mortality (data) in the Mediterranean
Worsening weather conditions do not change the fundamental reality: these deaths are not tragic accidents but the foreseeable outcome of deliberate policy choices. The withdrawal of state-led search and rescue, the outsourcing of responsibilities to Libya and Tunisia, and the obstruction of NGO operations have kept the Central Mediterranean among the deadliest migration routes in the world since 2014.
The way data on deaths and disappearances is presented is a political choice as well: Death counts are cited as evidence that crossings are dangerous and must be stopped – yet evidence linking policy decisions to increased mortality, such as non-assistance or the criminalisation of rescue, is consistently downplayed. This selectivity extends to data production itself: no state systematically records deaths at sea, and transparency is decreasing. Italy stopped publishing detailed SAR data in 2020; Tunisia halted interception reporting in 2024. Withholding data limits the ability to verify events and assess what is happening at sea.
Disenfranchised in life, unrecognized in death
The uncertainty surrounding the numbers is also a product of dehumanisation. People who are denied rights in life are denied recognition in death: bodies remain unidentified, unnamed, and unaccounted for. This is a recurring structural gap, reflecting both the conditions in which these deaths occur – no survivors, no witnesses, no documentation – and the systematic absence of identification processes.
Countering the invisibility of deaths at sea requires witnesses. NGO vessels and aircraft are often the only actors able to provide real-time evidence, survivor testimonies, and incident records. Yet their capacity to do so is being deliberately undermined through obstruction and criminalisation.
The issue is no longer only undercounting — deaths are becoming uncountable. Civil society efforts to document and name the dead have long compensated for state inaction. Today, those efforts are undermined by fewer witnesses, reduced data availability, and the absence of identification mechanisms.
What is needed is not only better data, but the conditions that make it possible: independent presence at sea, systematic identification of the dead, and transparent state reporting. Without these, deaths will continue to occur without record, without recognition, and without accountability.
1 According to IOM Libya data on Libyan Coast Guard operations.
2 InfoMigrants: Libye : au moins 28 corps de migrants découverts sur les côtes après plusieurs naufrages
3 Press Release by MEM.MED, ASGI, Mediterranea and Alarm Phone.
