Strategies for the identification of migrants in the Mediterranean: the shipwreck of April 18th, 2015

Currently relatives of the unidentified dead of the Mediterranean are the victims of severe violation of human rights since no effort is being made to identify these bodies. This report tells of how, under the lead of the Office of the Extraordinary Commissioner for Missing Persons of the Italian government and the scientific coordination of Labanof (University of Milan), experts from several universities and other agencies have created a model by which to collect and compare ante mortem and post mortem information from unidentified migrant decedents in the Mediterranean. Two thousand PM records and almost 400 AM records have been collected and forty identified through genetic and anthropological methods. This is the first scientific and political systematic attempt in Europe to harmonize international activities towards the identification of migrants. In this scenario one disaster poses extreme challenges, that of April 18 th 2015.