Racial and ethnic profiling, extortion, mass arrests, detention for days or weeks with little to no food, collective expulsions, beatings and torture: these are just some of the violations migrants, asylum seekers, and others have experienced over the past several years at the hands of security forces in the context of border and migration control in Mauritania, a country in northwest Africa. Meanwhile, those same forces have continued to receive financial and material support from the European Union (EU) and Spain.

Located south of Morocco, Mauritania is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, Senegal, Mali, Algeria, and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. Both a destination and transit country for mainly West and Central African migrants, Mauritania also hosts asylum seekers and refugees, the majority from Mali, where armed conflict and violence have worsened in recent years. With lighter-skinned Beidan Mauritanians, descendants of Arabs and Berbers, predominating in the security forces and upper levels of government, discrimination against Black Mauritanians – Haratine and Afro-Mauritanians – and Black migrants has persisted.

Report by the Human Rights Watch