“The police hit me a lot and didn’t give me food. They treated me like an animal. When I wanted to urinate or talk to an agent, they hit my hand or back with a whip.” Ibrahim Kamara, a 23 -year -old from Sierra Leone, is one of the immigrants who has dared to denounce the violence he suffered in his passage through Mauritania, from where he intended to make the leap to Europe. Its case, which occurred in August 2022, is collected in an extensive report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization in which the African western coast is documented, the main port of exit of the Cayucos that arrive at the Canary Islands. For more than four years the organization has interviewed 223 people, including more than 100 migrants or asylum seekers, which in some cases showed the scars and wounds compatible with the aggressions they described. He also compiled photos, videos and documents confirmed arrests, expulsions or injuries.
The document reveals the hidden face of immigration control, which explains why arrivals of precarious vessels, according to official data from the Spanish Ministry of Interior. The Mauritan authorities, as the Moroccans or the Tunisines do, act as EU gendarmes and have multiplied their control lately. His methods, however, have been questioning for years. The stories of the migrants collected by HRW denounce blows, hunger, humiliations, mass expulsions and fear of dying in police custody. The abuse, the victims point out, applies against black people.
In the first six months of this year, according to official data collected in the investigation. Abandoned to their fate without water and food, in many cases in areas threatened by terrorist activity. It is more than triple than in 2019. In part because the flow of migrants and refugees to the country is much greater, as is the pressure exerted by European countries to stop them.
Along the way, many of those migrants – among those who are women, pregnant women and minors – have denounced abuses of all kinds, enclosures and expulsions to remote areas. Only the bus trip of the detention centers to the country’s confines, hundreds of kilometers away, it is a punishment in itself for the hardness of the conditions in which it is done. But those expulsions also, according to HRW, would be illegal for their collective nature, prohibited by international law.
“Racial profile, extortion, mass arrests, detention of days or weeks, with little or no food, collective expulsions, beatings and torture: these are just some of the violations that migrants and asylum seekers have suffered in recent years at the hands of security forces in the context of border and migratory control in Mauritania,” the organization denounces. “Meanwhile, these same security forces have continued to receive financial and material support from the European Union and Spain,” he adds.
The organization has documented dozens of human rights violations between 2020 and 2025. “They made us suffer a lot in the desert. They undressed us, they took our clothes, left us lying on the ground from one to two in the morning… Then they told us: ‘Váyanse’, and they forced us 2022. After that episode, Diallo was again arrested in Nuadibú and expelled Mali. The research includes among the supposed abuses sexual aggressions to men and women. Also, in more specific cases, torture.
The report pages travel the hardships of the detention centers for immigrants, a black hole. The arrest has become an almost inevitable toll for thousands of people who aspire to reach Europe. But also for those who do not. Among the testimonies is that of a 17 -year -old Guinea’s teenager, who moved to Mauritania to work after being orphan and who ended up detained. “They had two weeks there. I wasn’t clean, I slept on the floor … there were days that I only eaten once a day,” he recalls. HRW documents that sometimes under 13 to 17 years they were held in the same cells as adult men, contravening all international standards. Several testimonies refer to aggressions and extortion to get money, practices that repeated by several people end up documented by HRW as a pattern.
The Mauritanian government has denied accusations of torture and racism. In spite of everything, the NGO points out that Mauritania has taken small steps. In May 2025, he adopted a landing protocol of migrants that includes obligations to give medical attention and carry out triajes to identify vulnerabilities of the shipwrecked. The country, which promoted a regularization of immigrants in 2022, has also been open to a greater inspection of external observers.
Research emphasizes European complicity. Mauritania is a key partner on the migratory board. For Spain, which has half a hundred agents between police and civil guards, and for the EU. He demonstrated how European (and Spanish) funds finance mass expulsion operations of immigrants to abort migratory plans of thousands of people in Morocco, Mauritania and Tunisia. In the case of Mauritania, the trucks used to arrest migrants coincide with the vehicles that the Spanish Ministry of Interior donated to the country in 2018.
With the immigration route to the Canary Islands open par, the relations were reinforced in March 2024, when a new era of immigration collaboration began. Brussels promised the delivery of 210 million euros to shield borders, intensify maritime and land surveillance, and combat migrant traffic. Spain, on the other hand, promised 300 million in projects, cooperation and credits for investors. Since then the control has increased, but the agreements still are not conditioned to a respect for the rights of immigrants. The EU states that all its contracts have clauses of respect for human rights, but HRW warns that there are no effective control or sanction mechanisms.
