UN migration agency launches website to track missing migrants

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN migration agency, said Thursday it had launched a new Missing Migrants Project website to track refugees and asylum-seekers who have died or gone missing while migrating to an international destination.

Clicking on the site, visitors are shown that 3,649 migrant fatalities have been recorded worldwide so far in 2017. Site data contain information on each incident in which a migrant death was recorded, including circumstances of the death as well as the profile of the migrants involved, where available.

IOM said the site was designed to be user-friendly and its functions include interactive graphics, regional pages, easy-to-access data, and publications, Xinhua news agency reported.

Users can view individual data points by zooming in on the maps at the top of each page, and can filter by month, year, and region, according to IOM.

Visitors to the site can also explore trends in data on Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

The Missing Migrants Project's full dataset is now available for download.

--IANS

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