Evidence-based action for human rights at borders

The Aegean Sea remains one of Europe's most contested maritime borders, characterized by complex interactions between state authorities, maritime accidents, rescue operations, and human rights concerns. Official statistics from Greek and Turkish Coast Guards often conflict, media reporting varies in accuracy, and humanitarian organizations document gaps between what authorities report and what communities experience. 

This Unified Monitoring Toolkit by Collective Aid addresses a critical need: standardized transparent methodology for collecting, coding, verifying, and ethically using incident-level data on border violence, maritime deaths, apprehensions, rescues, and related incidents. By establishing clear operational definitions, consistent coding rules, and verification procedures, this framework enables multiple stakeholders, researchers, advocates, policymakers, legal teams, to work with compatible datasets that maintain scientific rigor while honoring the human reality these numbers represent. 

For the pilot of the project the geographic focus remains the Aegean Sea. The design will allow for transferability to other EU external border regions.