Around 100 organisations denounce violence against people on the move in Ceuta

Migreurop is a co-signatory of this press release, which condemns the human rights violations committed by the Spanish and Moroccan governments against people on the move in Ceuta. The documentation work carried out by the Border Resistance team, together with volunteers and activist collaborators, through the work of the Tetouan, Fnideq and Nador sections of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), sheds light on a pattern of systematic physical and psychological violence. The text highlights the racialised and gendered nature of this violence and shows that it takes place in a context of tensions along the Morocco-Spain border, which is rooted in a colonial situation and decades of externalisation policies.

We are issuing this statement to document and denounce a series of interrelated human rights violations which, taken together, reveal a systematic policy on the part of the Spanish and Moroccan states and the European Union that treats migrants as pawns in a political and economic conflict, as well as direct and systematic violence that inflicts harm on the bodies of groups particularly vulnerable to institutional and border-related violence: people made vulnerable by migration policies and institutional racism; migrants, asylum seekers and children; and members of the LGBTIQ+ community, who are among the groups most exposed to this violence.

People on the move are not political pawns; they have their own motivations, needs, expectations and decisions that must be heard.
Human mobility does not arise from borders or from the policies that seek to regulate it. People are already on the move, making decisions and charting their own paths before they encounter the border controls that seek to restrict those movements. The border does not generate movement: it is constructed precisely to contain it.

This crisis is unfolding against a backdrop of decades of policies aimed at externalising European borders, through which Spain and the European Union have for years been funding, equipping and training security forces in Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Mali and Tunisia and Libya, by supplying hundreds of vehicles, drones and boats, with the aim of preventing migrants from reaching European territory. States seek to instrumentalise and control human mobility as a means of exerting geopolitical pressure, but migrants are not passive instruments.

What has happened in Ceuta cannot be understood in isolation from Spain’s colonial history in North Africa and Western Sahara. Ceuta and Melilla are border areas shaped by colonial relations, territorial disputes and racial hierarchies that determine who is allowed to move freely and who is subject to control, expulsion, or violence. This border has a history of several incidents in previous years that demonstrate this is not an isolated case; for example the deaths in 2005, the Tarajal incident in 2014, and the illegal returns of minors in 2021.

This model has repeatedly revealed its fundamental contradiction: in May 2021, more than 10,000 people entered Ceuta following Spain’s reception of the Polisario Front leader, Brahim Ghali. Various reports published in relation to these events described a deliberate opening of the border by Morocco as a pressure tactic linked to the Western Sahara issue. That crisis led to the dismissal of the Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya. On 24 June 2022, a bloody massacre took place at the Melilla border, claiming the lives of at least 27 people and leaving around 70 missing.

It is also worth noting that the Canary Islands alone received 23,000 migrants in 2020, according to official figures, the majority of whom came from the coast of Western Sahara, during one of the periods of highest numbers of migrants arriving by sea on the islands. Added to this context is a growing economic and strategic conflict centred on ‘Monte Tropic’, an underwater mountain situated some 499 kilometres from the island of El Hierro, which contains tonnes of tellurium, as well as cobalt, nickel and lithium – strategic minerals essential for the development of green technology and the energy transition. In 2009, Morocco submitted a request to extend its continental shelf to include this seamount, and Spain responded in 2014 with a similar request based on the natural extension of the Canary Islands. Subsequently, in 2020, Morocco extended its territorial waters through two parliamentary laws, which Madrid interpreted as an encroachment on its sovereignty. The issue returned to the forefront with renewed intensity in November–December 2025, following Security Council Resolution 2797 on Western Sahara, which strengthened Morocco’s negotiating position at the international level and reignited Spanish fears of losing control of these resources.

Against this backdrop of tension, Spain took a series of decisions prior to July 2026: an extraordinary, collective regularisation of thousands of migrants in an irregular administrative situation – a measure that the migrant and anti-racist movement had been calling for for years – and a visit by the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez to Algeria. The Prime Minister’s visit normalised bilateral relations after years of tension with Algeria, following Spain’s change of stance in 2023 to support Morocco’s autonomy plan for Western Sahara; And the ratification by the Spanish Parliament of a law aiming to grant Spanish nationality to Sahrawi people born under Spanish administration, with the number of potential beneficiaries estimated at between 80,000 and 200,000. It is also worth noting that Chinese investment in Spain rose from 249 million euros in 2024 to around 643 million euros in 2025, a figure cited as an additional factor in the major powers’ calculations regarding the region, alongside the fact that Algeria is Spain’s main supplier of gas.

In this same context, coinciding with the Throne Day celebrations in the Kingdom of Morocco, an extraordinary influx of between 50,000 and 70,000 people took place on 30 and 31 July 2026. The majority were Moroccans, alongside a minority from Sudan, Yemen, the Republic of the Comoros, Togo, Niger, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Palestine, Chad, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Eritrea, South Sudan, Syria and Benin… towards Ceuta, resulting in more than 120 deaths, the majority of which were young Moroccans and minors.

The incident was preceded by posts on Facebook and other platforms – the origin of which remains officially unknown – that specifically incited Moroccans, and not people of other nationalities, to head for Ceuta, falsely claiming that the border was open.

Unlike the leniency observed in the case of Ceuta, a violent intervention by the Moroccan authorities was recorded in the border area of Beni Ansar-Melilla, which reveals two different patterns of handling within the framework of negotiations with the European Union and Spain: the Melilla model and the Ceuta model.

We are not facing a “migration crisis”: the people who migrate are not the crisis; the crisis is political, and stems from a border regime that decides which lives matter, who can travel safely, and who must risk their lives to do so. We therefore denounce the Islamophobia and anti-Black racism that underpin this border regime. The racial and colonial construction of the ‘Moorish Muslim’ as a threat, and the criminalisation of Black Africans, fuel discourse of ‘invasion’ and ‘danger’ to pave the way for the violation of all rights, persecution, and control.

This statement is based on dozens of testimonies of first-hand accounts from migrant victims, including asylum seekers, minors and members of the LGBTIQ+ community. Taken together, these accounts document a pattern of deliberate and systematic physical and psychological violence, which we set out below.

The testimonies gathered from queer people reveal physical violence of particular intensity, exacerbated by hostility towards their gender identity. Several describe being punched, struck with batons across the face until their eyes were swollen, struck from behind with blunt objects, kicked in the chest and struck on the hands until they were bruised and stinging. These attacks often occur after they have been evicted from shelters, leaving them forced to sleep on the streets without any protection. Several testify that the mere fact of being visibly queer exposes them to heightened violence in public spaces, where no one dares to intervene, and that, unlike other people, they cannot seek refuge anywhere without once again becoming the target of attacks.

The most intense violence occurs at dawn (between 2.00 and 4.30 am), when it breaks out suddenly and without warning in the places where people are sleeping. At night, patrol cars generally arrive amid constant shouting and insults. During the day, the violence is relatively less intense, but it does not stop (shouting, insults, chasing); and the violence resumes immediately as soon as the victims move away from the volunteers or journalists accompanying them. People are woken from their sleep with direct blows from batons, or first with a torch and then with a baton; they are kicked with heavy combat boots; the places where they sleep are surrounded by large numbers of officers; the victims are ordered to get up and leave immediately (“Get out”), with those who do not obey being beaten; and their belongings (mattresses, cardboard boxes, luggage) are destroyed or damaged.

The testimonies describe an almost uniform and deliberate pattern: blows to the head of relatively lesser intensity compared with the legs, which receive much harder blows, suggesting a pattern calculated to cause severe physical harm whilst avoiding immediately visible or fatal injuries. Added to this are blows to the stomach, abdomen and back (leaving visible marks on the skin), direct blows to the face (punches and kicks, including injuries around the eyes), and deliberate blows to the pubic area and genitals, and fractures or injuries to the hands and wrists that render them immobile.

In some cases, there are documented instances of people who cannot swim being forced into the water under threat; patrols chase those who try to escape by swimming and attempt to drown them, according to a witness’s first-hand account; the person is held in the water and then pulled out so that the beating can resume whilst they are completely soaked; and entire groups are forced into the water only to be trampled on whilst wet.

Local residents spray tear gas directly into people’s eyes as a means of individual torture, sometimes after luring the victim under the pretext of ‘offering help’, and fleeing immediately afterwards. Mobile phones and spare headphones are systematically confiscated, particularly during night-time raids, and cash is stolen directly from pockets under threat of beatings, with some witnesses distinguishing between this ‘official’ theft and theft by common ‘street thieves’ as separate occurrences. Testimonies describe the diagnosis of serious injuries as “a simple muscle spasm”, without any actual examination; the refusal of clinics and hospitals to treat infected wounds; and gestures rejecting treatment without any clear medical justification.

Several witnesses also point to the use of officers capable of communicating in Darija during the operations, a practice which, according to those interviewed, heightened the intimidation and fear by allowing the officers to address them directly in their own language and to use that knowledge as part of the threats, assaults and torture they suffered.

The acts of violence documented through these testimonies cannot be understood in isolation. They form part of a broader context of control and criminalisation of those who attempted to cross the border and of those who took part in the subsequent protests. This crisis extended to include young Moroccans facing charges relating to the same attempt to cross the border.

In the Fnideq-Tetouan region, on the night of the mass crossing, the authorities arrested nine people, including five minors, in the context of the unrest in the town of Fnideq. The adults were held at the local prison in Tetouan and the minors were transferred to the child protection centre in Temara. The number rose rapidly to a total of 69 detainees. Thirty of them were sentenced to terms ranging from one full year to two months’ imprisonment, whilst a further seven were tried specifically on charges of incitement, amidst complaints from the Tetouan branch of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights regarding the seriousness of the absence of a defence during these trials, which it considers a flagrant violation of the guarantees of a fair trial.

As for the taxi drivers, they were sentenced to suspended sentences and fines at the appeal stage. In the context of the events in Ceuta, 69 people were arrested, all of whom were tried whilst on bail. The legal proceedings took place in the absence of defence lawyers, which constitutes a serious breach of the fundamental guarantees of a fair trial.

With regard to those who died, according to a statement by the Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH), during the first week of the events, more than 11 bodies were recovered on the Moroccan side and subsequently handed over to their families for burial. Several families continue to demand the return of their children’s bodies. According to statements by the Spanish authorities, Morocco refused to accept some of the bodies, despite the fact that six of them had been identified through fingerprints and DNA tests.

At the same time, in the Nador-Beni Ansar region, there was a wave of legal proceedings against individuals detained in connection with the same events. Some were sentenced to between four and six months’ imprisonment, in addition to paying collective compensation which, in one case, amounted to 84,000 dirhams and wastransferred to the Directorate-General for National Security.

Among those arrested were also minors. Some are currently facing criminal proceedings in court, with hearings continuing to be adjourned due to the absence of defence counsel, against the backdrop of the lawyers’ strike. At the hearing on 10 August 2026, 50 defendants appeared, spread across 13 cases, on charges relating to insulting public officials, the use of violence and damage to property.

Only 11 detainees were tried in person, whilst the rest were tried remotely, including two detained girls. In subsequent hearings before the Nador Court of First Instance, the court handed down custodial sentences and fines of 500 dirhams against several groups.

The violations did not stop at the arrests and trials, as they also involved the immediate return of hundreds of young people who had managed to reach Melilla. They were sent back through semi-clandestine gates located in the middle of the border fence in the ‘Barrio Chino’ area, under circumstances that raise questions about respect for legal safeguards and human rights in connection with return operations. Subsequently, hundreds of young people were expelled; they were forcibly transferred to remote and scattered areas just before reaching the cities (Guercif, Beni Mellal, Casablanca, Midelt…), and were abandoned there in the height of summer, in the midst of high temperatures and without being provided with the necessary conditions of protection and assistance…

This violence has not prevented migrants from developing forms of organisation and resistance. Resistance begins with movement, with the decision to leave the place to which they have been assigned, despite the borders and the measures designed to prevent it.

We have witnessed forms of resistance in everyday survival practices: sharing information about routes; coming to the aid of or caring for an injured person; sharing food or medicine; translating; protecting other people’s belongings; organising sleeping shifts to stay safe; passing on experiences and advice to others; memorising a telephone number or important information so that it is not lost if their phones are broken; or rebuilding networks that have been scattered by police and military raids.

We have witnessed alliance building with others; preservation of evidence and reporting the violence suffered; collective organisation and the assertion of rights, even when institutions block or prevent their exercise; the creation and maintenance of networks of communication and remote support; and building forms of solidarity and everyday organisation that enable us to collectively sustain the possibility of continuing to resist.

We demand:

• Opening an independent and impartial international investigation into all human rights violations that occurred in Ceuta and Melilla on both the Spanish and Moroccan sides, including taking direct testimonies from victims and conducting an independent medical examination of the injuries.

• The immediate and transparent disclosure of the identity and number of victims and missing persons, and that this information be provided to their families, as well as the handover of the bodies of those identified to their relatives for burial and to allow them to grieve with dignity.

• An immediate end to all forms of systematic beatings, to the forcing of people into the sea, and to the confiscation of personal belongings, carried out by the public authorities in Ceuta.

• Special and immediate protection for members of the LGBTIQ+ community and for minors, including the provision of dedicated centres for them.

• To guarantee a fair trial and the right to a defence for all young people detained in Tetouan and Nador, to review the harsh sentences handed down in the absence of a defence, and to release any minors in detention.

• To hold those responsible to account for any diplomatic agreement or tension between Rabat and Madrid that exploits human beings as a tool for political pressure.

• That European and international institutions (the United Nations, the Council of Europe, UNHCR, the UN Special Rapporteurs) fully exercise their mandates to hold Spain, Morocco and the European Union to account in accordance with their respective actions, competences and political responsibilities.

• To guarantee the continued distribution of food, water, and medical and psychological assistance to all those in Ceuta.

• Effective protection for activists, volunteers, journalists and the local population showing solidarity against threats and attacks, and the opening of an investigation into the data breach affecting their personal data.

• The launch of an independent investigation into the origin of the inciting posts that preceded the events of 30 July, and holding the digital platforms that allowed their unchecked dissemination to account.

• Opening the necessary judicial investigations against all racist calls and attacks issued by several parties, directly or indirectly, including on social media, against migrants in Ceuta.

• The publication of a regular public report setting out the figures for the dead, injured and detained, updated regularly and verifiable by independent bodies, rather than relying solely on scattered and unofficial data.

• Guarantee of effective protection for women, especially unaccompanied minors, and a serious and independent investigation into all sexual assaults and violations committed against them, holding those involved accountable and ensuring victims’ right to justice, protection, and health, psychological, and social care, along with safe mechanisms for reporting violations.