Inside the longest refugee protest in history

This article Inside the longest refugee protest in history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Agadez, Niger — On any given day, you will find a group of up to 1,000 people, including women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities, standing in the Sahara Desert, eight miles from the nearest town, holding signs that read “We don’t want to stay here,” “Refugees in the desert without protection” and “We don’t feel safe here.” 

Since Sept. 22, 2024, they have maintained a daily sit-in at the humanitarian center where they are being held. At nearly two years, it has become one of the longest continuous refugee-led protests in history — and almost no one knows about it. 

They are refugees, the majority from Sudan, others from Eritrea, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo and Cameroon. They are among approximately 2,000 people living at the Agadez Humanitarian Center, which is managed jointly by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, and Nigerien authorities. Established in 2017 with funding from the EU, Italy and the UK, Agadez was intended as a “transit point” for refugees awaiting resettlement. 

Instead, according to sources in the camp who wanted to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, refugees are held with limited movement, no asylum processing and no resettlement path. Some have been there for more than eight years. Nigerien authorities have claimed to offer local integration, but refugees report it happens without their consent.

“We’re stuck between a homeland that can’t be returned to and a humanitarian center that can’t be lived in,” the anonymous source said. “We are held in the desert, without the most basic necessities of life. This is our suffering.” 

The protesters have made their requests clear: resettlement to safe third countries, improved living conditions until then and an end to their “de facto detention.” 

But they are not suffering in silence. They are still standing proudly, despite intimidation, aggression and violence from the Nigerien police and military forces, and indifference and complicity from the agency meant to protect them.

Desert conditions in Agadez are an active threat to survival. Temperatures regularly exceed 105 degrees Fahrenheit, making exposure, dehydration and heat stroke constant risks. Ironically, when the former head of UNHCR in Niger, Emmanuel Gignac, visited the camp, he complained on camera of the heat to refugees and insisted they only talk in the shade. Compounding the heat risks is a lack of medical care, refugees said. And for nearly a year, most have received no food rations. 

UNHCR has repeatedly stated the center is “not a detention facility” and residents enjoy freedom of movement, a claim refugees refute. They point to mandatory passes for non-local travel, which are difficult to obtain from the local government, and often refused. Even with them, refugees face obstructions and payment of bribes at checkpoints, said a source.

A Cameroonian woman, Armelle, told InfoMigrants that when she tried to travel beyond the city of Agadez, Nigerien police stopped her. According to a refugee spokesperson, the police told her, “How dare you decide for yourself — you’re a refugee, you need permission.” 

One refugee summed up the situation, “I see no difference between the place I am in and a prison. What matters to me is conveying the truth about what is happening here.” 

The system that traps them

“The peaceful protests in Agadez aren’t an isolated event, but part of a broader refugee-led movement that has emerged wherever refugees have found themselves trapped in systems of indefinite containment,” said David Yambio, executive director and cofounder of the organization Refugees in Libya, which advocates for migrants and refugees in North Africa and Europe.

Yambio is himself a refugee from South Sudan. Born in 1997, he fled war as an infant with his family, and endured forced recruitment as a child soldier. Later he survived detention, torture and enslavement under notorious Libyan police chief Osama Almasri Najim in Tripoli. 

Through Refugees in Libya, Yambio has built a network that connects refugees across Libya, Tunisia, Niger and other North African countries who say UNHCR has failed to protect them. Together, they are documenting abuses and sustaining pressure on UNHCR. The organization is working with deported leaders of the Agadez protests to fight for those still trapped in the camp. 

“No community chooses to sustain a peaceful protest for more than 670 days unless every other avenue has failed,” Yambio said. 

Agadez is part of the EU’s strategy to externalize its borders and stop people fleeing wars from reaching Europe. “European borders no longer begin at the Mediterranean, they stretch deep into Libya, Tunisia, Niger and beyond,” Yambio said. 

The majority in Agadez are refugees of the war that erupted in Sudan in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a conflict that has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 15 million and unleashed ethnic violence in Darfur that the UN describes as bearing “the hallmarks of genocide.” Others have fled conflicts in Chad, Ethiopia, Cameroon and the Central African Republic, where political violence, insurgencies and instability are fueled by past colonial legacies and modern-day exploitation. 

Refugees do not set out for Europe lightly. Many try to find a home in neighboring countries first, but when that process is frustrated, as in Niger, with no work, no schooling for their children and no hope of a safe return to their home country, they move on. Europe is not their first choice; it is their last.

The Mediterranean nations of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya are the main avenues for refugees trying to seek safety in Europe. But authorities in those countries do the bidding of European governments by violently expelling refugees fleeing so they can’t reach Europe. In Libya and Tunisia, the EU funds “coast guard” operations not to save refugees, but to intercept migrant boats at sea and return them forcibly, often to Libya — where they face detention, extortion, torture and slavery. 

Other refugees intercepted in North Africa and the Mediterranean are dumped in the desert, abandoned near borders or sent to Mauritania, Niger and the Aegean Islands, where the EU funds mass detention centers. Algeria alone has deported over 80,000 people to Niger since 2024. 

These mass expulsions are not isolated acts but part of a coordinated “chain deportation corridor” in which European money, channeled through international organizations, finances a system of containment. In the Aegean Sea, EU-backed “Closed Controlled Access Centers” confine asylum seekers in detention for months under constant surveillance. In Mauritania, the EU and Spain fund migrant detention facilities known for inhumane treatment. The EU presents these centers as humanitarian, but the effect is to warehouse people indefinitely far from European courts, accountability or empathy. 

Agadez, likewise, operates as a legalized black hole: Refugees are held in a desert camp, their asylum claims are unprocessed, and while protesting peacefully against their detainment, their freedom of speech is criminalized by the authorities detaining them there — all paid for by European taxpayers.

If they try to travel past the nearest city, they are forcibly returned, often at gunpoint. One refugee explained, “We’re not migrants — we’re refugees fleeing war. But they treat us like criminals, as they don’t want us to reach Europe.” 

Inside the movement

The peaceful protests aren’t spontaneous. Refugees formed an elected National Refugee Committee shortly after the protests began in September 2024 to coordinate daily sit-ins, initiate hunger strikes, create petitions and write open letters. They use social media, particularly X, to document their plight, sharing photos and videos that reach the outside world. 

Nigerien authorities refuse to negotiate with the committee and warn refugees not to participate in it, a refugee spokesperson told me. “[The government] told us if refugees are part of a representative body, you won’t obtain your rights,” he said.

The sit-in has continued every day since it began on Sept. 22, 2024, through desert heat as high as 112 degrees Fahrenheit, punitive food ration cuts, arrests, police brutality, harassment and illegal deportations. 

Children participate, holding signs that count the protest days, starting at day one. The protesters chant a single slogan: “We don’t feel safe; we don’t want to stay here.”

The movement has faced repeated crackdowns. In January 2020, after refugees set up a protest camp outside UNHCR headquarters in the city of Agadez, security forces arrested more than 330 people. According to refugees who were present, security forces beat protesters, including children and pregnant women. The arrestees were locked in cramped unsanitary conditions without food for two days, sources say, and were only released after 48 days.

The sit-in that began in 2024 was met with escalating repression. In February 2025, UNHCR suspended food aid at the request of Nigerien authorities seeking to quell the protests. 

The following month, Niger’s National Eligibility Commission for Refugee Status, or CNE, issued a statement criminalizing all refugee committees, which read in part, “There is fundamentally no right to resettlement. … Therefore, organizing and participating in demonstrations of any kind within the Agadez Humanitarian Center to demand resettlement is intolerable.”

Eight protest leaders were then arrested, beaten and held for 10 days. 

“I am still suffering the consequences of that arrest, physically and psychologically,” one of the leaders said. “I got a broken finger on my right hand, severe headaches and have constant pain.” 

At a meeting where UNHCR was present, CNE revoked the protesters’ legal refugee status, and they were then illegally deported to Chad.

In August 2025, six more leaders were arrested in a raid involving 15 military vehicles, and were also deported to Chad. Their whereabouts remain unknown. The Nigerien military came to the detention facility, rounded people up and, as captured on film, threw one man headfirst into the back of a pickup truck, hands tied behind his back, and drove away with him. He has not been heard from since.

Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders, told The New Humanitarian that these arrests “may constitute enforced disappearances, and a grave violation of Niger’s obligations under human rights law.” 

“All six of those arrested were part of the committee that has been peacefully organizing in defense of the rights of refugees in Agadez,” she said. “I do consider them human rights defenders.”

Reached for comment, UNHCR said it learned of both sets of arrests after the fact, although sources in the camp say that UNHCR staff witnessed and did not intervene in the March 2025 arrests and beatings.

A UNHCR spokesperson said the agency “met with” Nigerien authorities after both arrests to “express its concerns and advocate for international protection standards.” At the deportation hearing, UNHCR said it provided “technical guidance” that “under international law … revocation [of refugee status] must be based on individualized assessments and must not be used as a punitive response to peaceful protest or collective action” and “any alleged violation of national laws and regulations should be addressed through the ordinary justice system.” 

The agency did not answer why it failed to prevent the deportations, despite the freedom of expression and speech rights ordained by the founding documents of the United Nations, and despite the agency’s international mandate to supervise how states implement refugee law.

Yambio said that retaliation against refugees who speak out isn’t isolated to Niger: “Across Libya, Tunisia and Niger, refugee leaders are increasingly labeled as troublemakers or threats to UNHCR rather than recognized as legitimate representatives.”

Complicit, negligent or incompetent?

UNHCR has issued multiple statements defending its operations. In January 2025, it said: “While we fully respect their right to peacefully protest and acknowledge the difficulties they face in a Agadez’s arid conditions, we urge the group to engage with us in a constructive manner and reconsider the assistance and local opportunities that have been made available.” Yet peaceful protesters have been arrested, beaten and deported on UNHCR’s watch. 

The agency acknowledged it “didn’t think [pausing food vouchers] was a good solution” but implemented it anyway. When pressed, UNHCR said in an email that it had “expressed deep concern” about its own suspension of food rations. The agency resumed food rations in summer 2025, but limited them to just 270 people it deems “most vulnerable.”

“UNHCR’s role is very weak, they treat us without humanity,” a Sudanese man held in the camp for more than seven years told me. 

UNHCR did not respond when asked why it has consistently failed to prevent violent crackdowns in the camps it operates, despite its legal mandate to protect refugees. 

On May, 25 2022, a 27-year-old man, Musab Muhammad, was shot dead at the center’s children’s school. Authorities tried to force his widow to sign a false death certificate claiming he was killed by a stone, but she refused. UNHCR supported the government’s claim that he had not been shot. But multiple witnesses confirmed the details of the incident — that security forces shot him, unarmed. “We refugees heard shooting, officers were firing tear gas and live bullets, they killed our brother in cold blood,” one man in the camp said. 

Reached for comment about Muhammad’s death, a UNHCR spokesperson said that “UNHCR deeply regrets the loss of life and the suffering” and “as a general principle … condemns the use of excessive force against refugees.” The spokesperson said that UNHCR provided Muhammad’s family with burial costs and “psychosocial support and counselling,” but “does not have the authority to conduct criminal investigations of use of force by Nigerien authorities.”

According to sources in the camp, medical care is also substandard. A health clinic nine miles  away provides only about 10 percent of promised services, detainees said. They said that they also lack access to translators or ambulance service from the camp to the clinic. 

A spokesperson for the National Refugee Committee says eight residents in total have died since 2024 of preventable causes, including hemorrhage and anemia. Their families granted permission to share their names.

On April 30, 2025, Saeed Ahmed, 34, a key organizer in the camp, died of anemia. Sources say that the health center was closed when he arrived, and then doctors failed to treat him. “Saeed was happy with his friends, a fighter,” said Amir, a former detainee. 

The other seven were Makina Wadi, 35, who died of severe postpartum hemorrhage with no doctor attending; Mohamed Abdallah and Abdallah Hashim, both 27, friends who met in detention in Libya before being forcibly deported to Niger; Imad Yousif, 30, described as someone who always demanded his rights and defended the rights of others; Nour Alhuda Musa, 28, a mother of five; Zubeida Abdelgabar, 33, a widow and mother of one; and Zahra Dawood, 33, a mother of three.

Asked for comment, UNHCR maintained that all cases of illness receive medical follow-up and that “access to health care is ensured through a protocol with the Agadez Commune Sanitary District. … The health and well-being of asylum-seekers and refugees remain our priority, and any loss of life is deeply regrettable.” 

The colonial continuum

Many observers note a disparity between the treatment of people fleeing wars in Africa and that of Ukrainian asylum-seekers. The fact that “some refugees are afforded full protection and rights, and others are not, demonstrates what many refugees experience as colonial continuity and segregation within the international protection regime,” Yambio said. “During displacement of Ukrainian refugees, UNHCR publicly and behind closed doors engaged European institutions, EU member states and the UK to establish exceptional protection mechanisms.” So why isn’t UNHCR doing the same for brown and Black refugees in Africa? 

The situation in Agadez can’t be understood in isolation. Refugees are fleeing wars fueled by the very forces that extract Africa’s resources and keep people trapped. The roots of modern tensions in Sudan lay in the policies implemented by the British colonial administration between 1899-1956, which divided the area along racial lines, privileging Arab-identifying groups in the north, while marginalizing African communities in the south and west, including Darfur. This divide and rule legacy, embedded in post-independence governance has fueled cycles of violence and displacement ever since.

External exploitation of the African continent continues. The United Arab Emirates, or UAE, fuels the Sudanese civil war by arming the RSF — who are accused of committing war crimes and genocide — with weaponry procured from U.S. arms manufacturers. The UAE’s motivations are strategic and economic securing access to Sudan’s gold and regional influence, while millions of Sudanese people are displaced.

This is no accident of history, but a pattern of extraction, destabilization and containment that mirrors colonialism. External powers fuel conflicts and extract Africa’s minerals, while underfunding the facilities built to contain people fleeing the destruction they cause. 

The resettlement crisis is global, but the UN system is failing to respond effectively. In 2025, only 200 resettlement places were allocated for all of Niger, against an assessed need of more than 15,000. None of the 200 went to the refugees in Agadez, according to sources there. 

Reached for comment, UNHCR said that more than 700 refugees had been resettled from the center since 2018, but didn’t dispute refugees’ assertion that CNE is currently failing to process claims. UNHCR told protesters in Agadez, “Less than 1 percent of refugees globally benefit from resettlement, so don’t expect it.” 

UNHCR’s former Special Envoy for the Central and Western Mediterranean Situation Vincent Cochetel confirmed in March 2025 that the UN did not support “a right to resettlement.” 

“There are almost no resettlement opportunities in Niger and priority must be given to Malian and Nigerian refugees,” he wrote on X. 

Asked by Waging Nonviolence about the prospects of resettlement for those held Agadez, UNHCR said, “The final decision always rests with the third country, not with UNHCR.” Effectively, a UN agency is declaring itself a neutered organization, with no power to resettle war refugees.

The spread of containment

Agadez is no anomaly. It has effectively been the pilot for Europe’s new Return Regulation, passed in June 2026, which makes offshore detention an official policy. 

“It’s not simply a humanitarian crisis or just operational failures of UNHCR, but a wider systemic mechanism in which refugees are increasingly contained rather than protected,” Yambio said. 

This extends far beyond Agadez. “UNHCR has repeatedly supported and agreed with governments implementing migration containment policies, embracing the Italy-Albania so-called return centers, the UK-Rwanda deportation deal, and blessed and congratulated Europe on its Return Regulation,” Yambio said. 

UNHCR’s own admissions reveal a confirmed pattern: awareness of abuses and choosing compliance over protection. 

“Resolving the situation in Agadez requires restoring refugee protection as the primary objective of international refugee law,” Yambio said. “It requires UNHCR to recover the independence necessary to confront abusive states. It requires Europe to end policies of externalization.”

Neither the European Union nor the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the UN responded to requests for comment.

“What begins with refugees rarely ends with refugees,” Yambio continued. “The migration containment policies being developed today increasingly shape domestic legal systems tomorrow.” As journalist Neal Ascherson wrote in a 1996 article about the al-Masari affair: “The way a state treats its aliens is the way it would treat its own subjects if it dared.”

In the Sahara Desert, the nonviolent protests will continue, signs will still rise, the refugees still remain standing in the desert. Their words are clear: “We are human beings; we have the right to a decent life. Through pain and hope, we refugees of Agadez, Niger, don’t want to stay here in this desert.”

They are sharing the stories of how they fled wars and genocides and how they’re seeking justice on X at @refugeesniger @RefugeesTunisia and @RefugeesinLibya.

The choice of nonviolence isn’t incidental. In a system designed to render them invisible, protesters have chosen a strategy that forces the world to look. They have chosen to absorb violence without returning it, not as a form of passivity, but as a strategy grounded in their reality. Their discipline in the face of brutality lays bare the moral asymmetry of the system that claims to protect them while imprisoning them.

This article Inside the longest refugee protest in history was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

People-powered news and analysis

Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/07/agadez-niger-longest-refugee-protest/