As of 2026. Detention, containment and pushback figures are compiled from national and NGO monitoring and continue to change with each year's arrivals and with EU policy, including the pact on migration and asylum now entering force.
After more than a million people crossed the Mediterranean in 2015, the European Union adopted a containment approach built on island hotspots in Greece and Italy, the March 2016 statement with Turkey, and cooperation with Libyan and other authorities to intercept departures. Asylum seekers were held for extended periods in facilities far beyond their capacity — Moria on Lesbos held roughly 20,000 people in a site designed for 3,000 before it burned in 2020 — and from 2021 in new closed controlled-access centres with restricted entry and exit. Human rights bodies including the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, UNHCR and the EU's own anti-fraud office have documented summary returns without asylum assessment at the Greek-Turkish, Croatian, Spanish and Polish borders, which the states concerned deny or defend as border protection. IOM's Missing Migrants Project has recorded more than 30,000 deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean since 2014. The system is Europe's largest contemporary confinement regime and was absent from the atlas.
European Union member states and Frontex confined arriving asylum seekers in island hotspots and closed centres, contained them in transit countries under bilateral deals, and conducted summary returns at land and sea borders
UNHCR's operational data record about 1.03 million Mediterranean sea arrivals in 2015 alone and a cumulative total of roughly 2.5-3 million sea and land arrivals to Europe between 2015 and the mid-2020s; Frontex detection figures for the same period are higher because they count crossings rather than people. There is no resident population that this event acts on, so arrivals are the only meaningful denominator.
IOM's Missing Migrants Project has recorded upwards of 25,000 deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean since 2014 from confirmed reports; the higher end reflects IOM's own caution that many shipwrecks leave no survivors to report them, so the recorded total is a minimum. Deaths inside reception facilities are counted separately by national authorities and are far smaller.
UNHCR, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights and the Greek and Italian ombudsman institutions have documented prolonged detention of asylum seekers in the hotspot and closed-centre system.
Greece, Turkey, Libya, Malta