Revealed: 1,000-plus unmarked graves along EU borders

Refugees and migrants are being buried in unmarked graves across the European Union at a level unprecedented outside war. The Guardian can reveal that at least 1,015 men, women, and children who died at the borders of Europe in the past decade were buried before being identified.

They lie in stark, often blank graves - rough white stones overgrown with weeds in Sidiro cemetery in Greece; crude wooden crosses in cemeteries in Italy's Lampedusa. In northern France faceless slabs of concrete say simply "Monsieur X", in Poland, Lithuania and Croatia plaques read "NN" or name not known.

The European Parliament passed a resolution in 2021 that called for people who die on migration routes to be identified and recognised the need for a coordinated database to collect details of the bodies. But across European countries, the issue remains a legislative void, with no centralised resource, nor any uniform process.

Working with forensic scientists from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and other researchers, NGOs, and pathologists, the Guardian and a consortium of reporters have pieced together for the first time the numbers of unidentified migrants who have died in the past decade along the EU’s borders, and visited 24 cemeteries across the continent to track some of their graves.