She was born in El Ejido, Andalusia, in 1970. In 2001 she moved to Morocco, where she established close relationships with migrant communities. It was this contact that would determine the direction of her life. She documented conditions on the increasingly dangerous migration routes between Spain and Morocco, where human life is treated as dispensable, tracking movements and responding to calls for help.
Throughout her career as a journalist and researcher, she has documented the deadly border crossings between North Africa and Southern Europe. In 2002, she founded the civil society organization Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders). The organization's "Monitoring the Right to Life" reports aim to track migrants who lost their lives while trying to reach Europe via the Western Euro-African border migration route, communicating with their families, documenting losses, and holding states accountable. At the same time, the organization exposes illegal pushbacks and violent border interventions carried out through cooperation between the Spanish and Moroccan governments within the framework of migration policies.
In 2017, she was summoned by the Moroccan judiciary and accused of people smuggling and facilitating illegal immigration, charges that carry a potential life sentence. These accusations were based on four reports from the Spanish police’s border control unit (UCRIF), Frontex and Europol, part of an investigation that began in 2012 with no judicial oversight and that violated her fundamental rights. The accusations drew major international backlash. Following solidarity calls from numerous human rights organizations, the case was dropped in 2019, but she was deported from Morocco in 2021. While supporting migrant women and children in Morocco, she was subjected to an assassination attempt. She received death threats. In a single year, between 2020 and 2021, she was subjected to 37 separate attacks, threats, surveillance, phone tapping, and raids on her home, revealing the dimension of the systematic pressure she faced. These attacks have put her life and her daughter’s life at risk.
She led global campaigns working for the transformation of European Union migration policies on the basis of transparency and human rights. She has received over 20 awards for her work.
She has dedicated her life to making visible the invisible violence of borders and defending migrants' right to life. Through the solidarity networks she established, she built a collective framework that aims to bring migrants out of loneliness and invisibility, and ensure they are recognized and defended as rights holders.
I am writing these words of gratitude on the same day that news broke of the murder of Anas Al-Sharif, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza, alongside other fellow journalists who were killed for reporting on the genocide. They were brave witnesses who gave their lives, defending freedom of information and the protection of human rights, which are now under siege across the world. I ask myself what journalists like me—after all, I am a journalist—would have done in that situation. And if we would have had the courage to resist and endure the bombs, the hunger, the thirst, and total destruction of our land.
Anas and many others have become symbols of resistance against a dehumanising world that is falling apart. Genocide is tangible proof of this, and the struggle of the Palestinian people is a beacon of hope in the darkness.
This is a special award because it also comes from the resilience of a people, a people who rose again after genocide. They got back on their feet, rebuilt their communities, and kept their culture alive. They showed the world that memory is a way of life and a path to justice. Hrant Dink was also murdered because of his commitment to truth, memory and co-existence between peoples. For this reason, I reiterate that it is an immense honour for me and I express my gratitude. This is a beautiful award because it stems from roots that have sprouted again. You have my utmost admiration and respect.
We cannot deceive ourselves. We are living in a time full of uncertainties, where the demons of horror have become daily companions in our lives. Extractivists are literally bleeding the earth dry by uprooting olive trees from occupied territories, extracting coltan from the depths of the earth in Congo with the hands of children, burning lands to obtain minerals, and shooting at those who approach rivers to fetch water. Meanwhile climate change, a phenomenon that already causes deaths and famine and yet to be decisive in the coming years for the human migratory movements, is denied. Racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and hatred of “the other” have become a kind of perverse mantra that promotes death. Dehumanisation runs rampant, flourishing in fertile ground. At the borders we know this well: we understand how necropolitics constructs lawless realms, how it selects which lives are disposable, lives that do not matter to a devouring and extractive system. Borders where a low-intensity war is being waged, with victims from only one side, while the perpetrators, the murderers, enjoy terrifying impunity. These are spaces where arms companies have invested in migration control, and turned migration into a double business - causing displacement in the first place and inflicting unbearable suffering and death on those who flee. They kill them or let them die simply for exercising their right to move.
The new overseer of the world, whose name is not even worth mentioning, runs an empire built on yet another genocide. This genocide targets indigenous peoples, and was rooted in the blood of thousands of enslaved Africans. This individual boasts of constructing prisons surrounded by crocodiles for those who dare to move. His police arrest mothers picking up their children from school and make people disappear in third-country detention centres simply for being migrants.
The border regime is similar everywhere in the world. The Fortress Europe has built walls and deadly fences, subcontracted North African countries to act as gendarmes, and drawn invisible walls in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The construction of lawless realms has been accompanied by the victimisation, criminalisation and objectification of people.
This forum and this award provide an opportunity to denounce the creation of lawless spaces around population control policies that undermine the right to mobility and the right to live with dignity.
We are here to denounce the death and exploitation of migrants as a business for corporations. It is no coincidence that much of the surveillance technology that kills people daily at the borders is of Zionist origin and was first tested on the Palestinian people, only to be later purchased by other criminal states.
We are here to confront a racism that underpins the ideology behind death and suffering. We are here to honour the 31,258 people whose deaths our organisation, Caminando Fronteras, has documented along the borders of Spain and Africa from 2018 to the present, and the thousands who lose their lives each day in borderlands. Their memory sustains us.
For their sake, we cannot surrender to despair or fear. Dignity is the way forward when the roots of life and solidarity are under attack on so many fronts.
We must remember the struggles of those who paved the way for us. Although the present is frightening, it is also filled with love and hope. We must bring our ancestors here to this site because our own genes carry the memory of their struggles.
We must thank those who put their bodies on the line, the women and children alike. In the face of constantly unfolding attacks and genocides, women make daily life possible by turning every gesture into a revolution. They do this by building on old knowledge and remaining committed to their reality.
Looking back on all these years marked by immense pain, I have found love in the thousands of people who stand firmly against suffering, and also in the honour of those who have died, remembered by their families and communities. They are mourned and prayed for as a way of keeping their memory alive. I want to thank them because they all live on inside me, and their lives transformed me. I want to thank those of you that never let me fall in front of those who continue to persecute us. I want to thank my companions on this journey and acknowledge their faith in every moment of their lives. We continue to stand strong and fill trenches with life and struggle. Many of us are determined to fill with life what States have occupied with death. We have the weapons and dignity to shake the walls and fences of all borders. Today is a day to send a message that we are united and that rights are not rights if they are not for everyone.
We are the mother on the beach whose child is torn from her arms by the violence of border control while she herself is violated, humiliated, and abused. We are the child who crosses the Atlantic alone after being separated from their mother’s embrace; we are in a rubber boat that is sinking, calling for help for hours, and we are the child who drowns while no one does anything to save our life. We are the bones that lie for ten years in the unmarked graves of Tarajal while families are denied the chance to identify, mourn, and repatriate their loved ones. We are the corpses on the beaches sought by desperate families. We are all those who have disappeared behind walls and fences. They claim not to know anything about us, but we disappeared under the military and police control. We are the families seeking their loved ones, expelled from police stations and vilified. We are the communities making lists of the disappeared and mourning their dead. We are disposable lives. We are the thousands of victims who have been humiliated and shamed by being called “clandestine”, “invaders”, “whores”, “blacks”, “unaccompanied minors”, “bad mothers”, “illegal immigrants” and “traffickers”. We are the survivors of the genocides. We are all of them.
Today, we cry out on behalf of everyone that shame no longer lies with the victims, but with their perpetrators, the criminals. And despite the impunity they enjoy, they carry with them ignominy and the guilt. Even if they try to hide it, the blood of countless innocent people runs through their executing hands. That is why our gratitude, today and always, goes to the victims, because their memory sustains us. It goes to their loved ones for the strength they give us to break down walls and have confidence in the future. It goes to those who fight and struggle every day for life. Thank you, sisters. For a world without borders, long live free Palestine!