Refugees at Sea

In April 2015, over 1,000 would-be migrants drowned in a single week while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea.¹ Most had started their journey in Sub-Saharan Africa, where gross human rights violations and civil break-down were, and remain, rampant. Because Turkey had enhanced its border control measures to try to quell the flow of asylum seekers fleeing from Syria, it had become harder to reach the safety of European states via a land corridor. Opportunities for smugglers and traffickers increased, who routed tens of thousands of displaced people to the coastal state of Libya. Here, many migrants found themselves sold