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.
Due to the increasing migration pressures and insecurity in the Sahel, Mauritania has grown in geostrategic importance for the EU and Spain, whose Canary Islands are some 700 kilometers from Mauritania’s northernmost city, Nouadhibou.The sea migration route from northwest Africa to the Canaries, known as the “Atlantic Route” or “Northwest African Route,” has grown increasingly active since 2020, becoming one of the busiest and deadliest irregular routes to Europe. In 2024, a record 46,000 migrants and asylum seekers – mostly from West, Central, or North Africa, with Malians the most numerous – arrived in the Canaries in small boats. That year, the majority of departures along the route were from Mauritania. Others embarked from Senegal, The Gambia, Morocco, and the Western Sahara.
In total, more than 147,000 people arrived in the Canaries by boat between 2020 and 2024, with 11,300 more arriving during the first half of 2025. Estimates of how many people lost their lives en route during this period vary from 4,300to 24,800. Tens to hundreds of thousands of others were rescued or intercepted at sea, or blocked from departing, by Mauritanian, Moroccan, Senegalese, and Gambian forces, supported by EU funds and Spanish forces deployed in Mauritania and Senegal.
In March 2024, the EU announced a new migration partnership with Mauritania and €210 million in funding for the Mauritanian government to reinforce border and migration management, counter-smuggling, and security, while addressing “root causes” of migration through support to refugees, job creation, infrastructure, and more. This is part of the EU’s ongoing “border externalization” approach in Africa: seeking to prevent irregular arrivals in Europe by outsourcing migration controls to countries of origin and transit. In Mauritania, the EU and Spain had been pursuing this strategy long before the 2024 partnership, despite ongoing violations of migrants’ rights by Mauritanian authorities.
This report focuses on the impacts of migration control along the Atlantic Route during the last five years, documenting abuses by Mauritanian security forces and revealing how EU border externalization disregarded and exacerbated human rights violations.
Mauritanian Security Officials’ Abuses
Between 2020 and early 2025, Human Rights Watch documented scores of human rights violations against men, women, and children from multiple West or Central African countries committed by Mauritanian authorities enforcing migration and border controls at sea and on land. Documented violations include torture, rape, and other physical abuse; sexual harassment; arbitrary arrests and detention; inhumane detention conditions; extortion; confiscation of money and valuables; and summary and collective expulsions. Perpetrators were members of the police, coast guard or navy, gendarmerie, and army; in a few cases, victims were unable to identify the security service.
During over four years of research, Human Rights Watch interviewed 223 people by phone and in person during visits to Mauritania, Mali, Senegal, and Belgium. These included 102 migrants and asylum seekers and 121 others – government, UN, and EU officials; members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society groups; relatives of abuse victims; witnesses; and experts, lawyers, community members, and others.
Among those interviewed, 78 people were victims of documented human rights violations in Mauritania. They included one Mauritanian accused of migrant smuggling and 77 foreign nationals – 3 asylum seekers and 74 migrants, some with regular migration status and some irregular – from Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.
Human Rights Watch examined scars and injuries sustained from alleged abuse and collected photos, videos, and legal documents corroborating interviewees’ accounts. We visited immigration detention centers in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou and Dar Naïm Prison in Nouakchott, observing conditions and interviewing people detained for immigration reasons or on smuggling charges.
As this report shows, Mauritanian security forces frequently subjected migrants and asylum seekers from African countries to harassment and arbitrary arrest. Authorities targeted individuals or groups based on information or assumptions that they were undocumented, planning irregular departures to North African countries or Spain, or involved in migrant smuggling – defined by the United Nations as the facilitation of irregular migration in exchange for financial or material benefit. Some used migration control as a pretext for extortion. Multiple migrants interviewed also alleged that security forces racially profiled them or demonstrated racist treatment because they were Black. Some said officers did not check their documents or allow them to retrieve their papers prior to arrest.
Human Rights Watch documented cases of physical abuse, ranging in severity from torture and rape to beatings and other mistreatment, against at least 43 people. Incidents occurred during or after boat interceptions and disembarkations; during arrests or interceptions on land; and during detention and expulsions. In a serious case in August 2022, police in Nouakchott tortured at least four men during interrogations related to migrant smuggling. “They removed my clothes…and beat me. …They shocked me with [electric] current…,” one man said. “They said I was helping people to go to Spain.”
Many people held in police-run immigration detention centers in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou described inhumane treatment and conditions, including lack of food, overcrowding, and sanitation issues, with adolescent children at times detained with adults.
Following detention, Mauritanian authorities have expelled tens of thousands of African foreigners to remote areas along the borders of Mali and Senegal, where limited available aid – and in Mali’s case, armed conflict – has put people at risk. Many such cases constituted collective expulsions – removals of groups of people without individual case assessments or due process – which are prohibited by international and African regional law. Some of those expelled to these land borders have included third-country nationals (who are neither Malian nor Senegalese), children, pregnant women, asylum seekers, refugees, and people with valid legal status in Mauritania.
Human Rights Watch interviewed 35 people who were expelled from Mauritania without due process between 2020 and April 2025. Other expulsions were reported by aid workers, UN officials, local media, and authorities. In early 2025, a spike in mass expulsions of migrants from Mauritania – which many attributed to increased EU funding and pressure to “manage” irregular migration – triggered political tensions with Mali and Senegal.
This report explores issues related to rescues and interceptions of migrant boats in the Atlantic and disembarkations in Mauritania, including inadequate search-and-rescue and the prioritization of “pullbacks” – forcibly returning people or preventing them from departing – which can violate the right to seek asylum and the right to leave any country. While Mauritanian authorities took some steps to improve post-disembarkation treatment of migrants between 2020 and 2024, they failed to consistently ensure screenings for medical and protection needs (such as for asylum seekers, trafficking victims, and children) after every disembarkation. However, in a positive step in May 2025, Mauritania formally adopted national standard operating procedures (SOPs) to regulate sea rescues, interceptions, disembarkations, and the management of migrants, outlining authorities’ obligations to respect rights and ensure protection and medical care.
The report also documents due process concerns in cases of people investigated or prosecuted for migrant smuggling in Mauritania, including alleged false charges; limited evidence of “financial or material benefit” (a key component of the UN definition of migrant smuggling); prolonged pretrial detention; limited access to legal aid; language barriers; and frequent penalization of lower-level “accomplices.” Human Rights Watch also heard allegations from multiple sources that some Mauritanian security force members colluded with smugglers.