The problem

Deaths, disappearances, detention and deportations at borders rarely leave clean evidence. The evidence exists, scattered across tips, testimonies, field notes from different organisations and collectives, media reports, litigation filings, satellite traces, and unofficial lists. That fragmentation is why there is so much impunity: because individual incidents rarely meet the threshold for policy change, strategic litigation, or public accountability.

TIE exists to document these trends, challenge accountability failures and advocate for protective, rights-based alternatives that prevent inevitable tragedies. Since its first deployment, TIE findings have been cited in the Bosnian parliament, referenced in proceedings in Geneva, cited by the United Nations, and covered by international media. The methodology works because the evidence it produces is structured to deliver results.

 
 

SEE OUR REPORTS

Read our thematic reports using TIE on critical issues throughout the year, and every month

SEE OUR ESSAYS

Read our essays and updates that use TIE to develop informed reflections on our work.

SEE OUR POSITIONS

Read our official positions that we issue in response to key issues and developments.

SEE OUR CITATIONS

Read where TIE has been cited by institutional human and fundamental rights channels.

 

How it works

Collect

TIE is designed to be a structured method for transforming dispersed, low-visibility data about harms into corroborated evidence of systemic violence. Individual incidents may be contestable. Patterns in a large enough dataset are not.

Corroborate

TIE works by integrating all known incident information across sources, formats, and actors, and revealing the systemic evidence of violence at borders.

Translate

TIE is a reproducible investigative architecture, designed to be used by civil society, researchers, journalists, and legal practitioners who need to move from isolated accounts to defensible claims about systemic wrongdoing.

Why this matters

TIE maps the mechanisms and policies that cause harm by reconstructing the ecology of incidents they produce, organising scattered events into a single, defensible picture of evidence that is:

Credible multi-source, verified, structured, and reproducible, built to withstand scrutiny from institutions, courts, and the press

Actionable pattern-based and ready for reporting, relevant to policy processes and designed for use by legal practitioners and investigators

Grounded rooted in lived experience, community knowledge, and witness statements, ensuring the people most affected are the foundation of the evidence

This depends on independent support

Advocacy like this takes time, trust, and tenacity. Every report we publish, every story we verify, every pattern we surface, all depends on support from people who believe accountability matters.

Join us

Regular giving allows us to stay independent, act quickly, and sustain long term investigations that hold systems to account.

Share our work

Visibility creates pressure. Each person who reads and shares amplifies the demand for change.

work with us

We collaborate with a range of researchers. Get in touch if you would like to work together.

Origin of TIE

TIE emerged from a practical problem. During Collective Aid's Evidence-Based Action for Human Rights at Borders project, incident data was being collected, but scattered across testimonies, field notes, media reports, and institutional traces. Individual incidents were documented. The systemic picture was not. TIE was developed to solve that: to create a method that could collect, verify, and connect different forms of information into a single, coherent evidentiary picture.

The method was first deployed in the Aegean, producing a dataset of border violence incidents across 2024 and 2025, deaths, disappearances, shipwrecks, pushbacks, and boat chases, linked across time, source type, and outcome to reveal recurring patterns rather than isolated events.

It was then tested in a substantially different context: the Lukavica detention centre in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That deployment confirmed TIE's transferability, the same structured approach could be applied across a different geography, a different form of harm, and a different evidentiary landscape.

Today, TIE underpins all of Collective Aid's advocacy and investigative work. Every statement, blog post, monthly report, and major investigation contributes to the same evidence-building architecture.

Work with TIE

TIE is designed to be used beyond Collective Aid. If you are a researcher, journalist, legal practitioner, or civil society organisation working to document systemic harm at borders, we want to hear from you. We collaborate on evidence development, dataset integration, and methodology deployment.

Contact

Message
RESEARCHERS