On one of Europe’s most visited coastlines lies a border where people are pushed back, detained, and sometimes die trying to cross. This report is an attempt to make that reality impossible to ignore.
The Solidarity Programme for Refugee Help (SPRH) is an initiative founded by students of the Sciences Po Paris Menton campus. Every weekend, its volunteers head to the Franco-Italian border between Menton and Ventimiglia to distribute food and document, firsthand, what is happening to people on the move. This sixth edition compiles testimonies gathered between October 2025 and May 2026, paired with rigorous legal and academic research grounding each story in French, Italian, and EU law. United Against Inhumanity supports this initiative.
A few things you’ll find inside:
- 121 individuals from over 20 countries were recorded crossing the border in the data collection period — from Morocco and Sudan to Afghanistan and Pakistan.
- Testimonies of migrants signing documents they couldn’t understand, with no interpreter present — a direct breach of both French and EU law.
- Accounts of minors pushed back with falsified birth dates, and of biometric “age tests” that fail to meet the EU’s own legal standards.
- A man with valid refugee status and an Italian ID, still turned away at the border for lacking “adequate” paperwork.
- First-hand accounts of the psychological toll of displacement — from PTSD rates eight times the national average, to a young man’s suicide following a violent assault.
- A clear-eyed look at what’s coming next: how the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum, in force since June 2026, risks deepening the very abuses this report documents.
This isn’t a report about statistics — it’s about the people behind them, and we share it as part of UAI’s “Stop Inhumanity at Europe’s Borders” campaign, because bearing witness is the first step toward accountability.
Read the full report, share it, and help make sure these stories don’t go unheard.
