Spanish protest after young boy's body is washed up in Cádiz

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/31/spanish-protest-boy-body-washed-cadiz-eu-boat-migrant

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Spanish human rights activists and politicians have attacked Europe’s treatment of migrants after the body of a young boy washed up on a beach in Cádiz on Friday, prompting comparisons with the death of Alan Kurdi.

The child, who has yet to be identified, is thought to have been heading to Spain from north Africa with his mother when the boat on which they were travelling sank off the Spanish coast two weeks ago. The bodies of six people – five men and a woman – have been recovered so far.

Although a police investigation is being carried out to establish the boy’s identity and determine how he died, unconfirmed reports suggest he was called Samuel, was six years old and came from the Congo.

Migration NGOs in the region, including Andalucía Acoge (Andalucía Welcomes) are trying to reach relatives and assist the police, but stress that the child has yet to be identified.

One local organisation, theHuman Rights Association of Andalucía (APDHA), said the boy was the latest casualty of the EU’s border security policies. It likened his death to that of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos in 2015 and became the face of the migrant crisis.

“We don’t know how many Alans, how many Samuels, how many men and women lie at the bottom of the sea without their families knowing anything,” it said in a statement. “All of them had a life and a story that Europe cannot ignore.”

The association said it could not understand how the EU’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, could criticise Donald Trump’s travel ban and border wall while the union’s own policies allowed children and adults to die. “They are fleeing from wars, situations of misery, hunger and exploitation and Europe remains shut up to them like a fortress.”

Announcing a protest – to be held at 7pm on Tuesday in the town of Barbate, where the boy’s body was discovered – the group called for a new and more humane approach to refugees and migrants.

The demand was echoed by Maribel Mora, an Andalusian senator for the anti-austerity Podemos party, who said: “We need a change in migration policy so that the Mediterranean doesn’t keep being a mass grave for those fleeing hunger, misery or war.”

Miguel Molina, the mayor of Barbate, said the town was on the “front line” of the migration crisis and called for international agreements to tackle the problem. “Sometimes we need to find the names of [the dead] so we realise we’re talking about human lives,” he told the Spanish news agency EFE. “We need to put an end to this.”

A local spokesman for the Madrid government said the boy’s body had been found on a beach in Barbate at 8am last Friday. “The civil guard were informed and the body was taken to the Institute of Forensic Anatomy in Cádiz for autopsy, where it remains,” he said. “An investigation has been opened to establish whether it came from the sinking of the boat on 13 January.”

The civil guard said the body had yet to be claimed and could not be released without a DNA test to confirm a family link and the necessary legal checks. “As long as we don’t have those, we can’t say whose body this is,” said a spokesman. “Some NGOs are talking about who it may be but at the moment we don’t know.”

According to the International Organisation for Migration, at least 246 migrants are estimated to have died in the Mediterranean so far this year, 36 more than at this point in 2016. Although Italy, Greece and Turkey have received large numbers of migrants and refugees, some of those leaving sub-Saharan Africa strike out for Europe from Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s two Moroccan enclaves.