European project 'opens new doors' to migrant identification

Liverpool John Moores University’s ‘mission’ to help identify migrants who die crossing the seas to Europe is employing new technologies and techniques to help families of the missing.

The Migrant Disaster Victim Identification project, chaired by Professor Caroline Wilkinson, is breaking new ground in forensic investigations in a bid to reverse the startling statistics around unidentified deaths.

“It is thought that at least 25,000 people have died in the last 10 years crossing the Mediterranean alone,” said Wilkinson, an expert in facial identification and director of LJMU’s world leading Face Lab. “Only [about] 25% of those are ever formally identified – and those are just the ones where the bodies are found. There’ll be thousands of other bodies that have never been recovered from those migrant disasters.”

The project, launched in 2023, and reported in The Guardian, has seen Wilkinson and colleagues thinking outside of the box to give closure to relatives of the deceased amid a backdrop of political, legal and socio-economic obstacles to a complete and humanitarian approach to the deaths.

Barriers to justice

Unlike in other disasters, the people are often not carrying forms of identification while friends or family members are likely to be reluctant to engage with the authorities in countries where they suspect their loved one has disappeared.

Until recently, countries have not treated migrant deaths as disaster victim identification (DVI) incidents, meaning certain forensic protocols are not be followed. “If it is a DVI incident, countries can also ask for help from Interpol and from other member countries, leading to more potential resources,” said Wilkinson. “If it is not a DVI incident, then the investigation can often be considered criminal, with negative implications for any survivors, support groups or families of the victims.”

However, within the past two years, migrant-related discussions within Interpol’s DVI working group have ramped up. According to Det Supt Jon Marsden, the UK’s Migrant Disaster Identification coordinator, their main focus is on linkage and support to programmes such as Wilkinson’s.

Often more readily available are photographs on social media of the missing person – perhaps even taken on their journey. Wilkinson and her colleagues recently published a study in which postmortem images of 29 identified deceased migrants were compared with an archive of images taken when these individuals were living. Following a protocol they had previously developed, the researchers examined different areas of the face to see if they could match the deceased individuals to the correct living person. The overall accuracy rate was 85%.

'Secondary identifiers'

Another initiative is exploring the use of “secondary identifiers”, such as a person’s facial features, birthmarks, tattoos or piercings, as a legal means of identification. Although such features are informally used, dental records, DNA and fingerprints are currently the only identifiers legally accepted.

Another collaboration that has grown from the MDVI initiative is the development of handheld scanners that first responders or charity workers could use to record deceased migrants’ features, before further decomposition sets in

“The magic of 3D is that once an image is captured, you can change the angles, the lighting and introduce various artefacts that might make the face more recognisable to someone who knows the person, whereas a 2D photograph [of the deceased] might be more of a struggle, said Dr Frederic Bezombes at LJMU's Forensic Research Institute, who is developing the scanners.

Other recently developed technologies are also being looked at, including software of ocean currents which may help predict where bodies or living survivors of maritime accidents were likely to wash up.