Helena Maleno, Spanish activist, persecuted for saving lives

“They prevent me from going home, they took away everything I have!” “ This cry of alarm is launched by Helena Maleno, in a video on social networks. The migrant rights defender, awarded with numerous awards, had lived for fifteen years in Tangier in Morocco. She was brutally turned back on January 23 and sent back to Spain by the Moroccan authorities. She did not get her 14-year-old daughter back until thirty-two days later. Her representations to the Spanish and Moroccan governments to get her to return home were unsuccessful.

Helena Maleno, journalist and researcher specializing in migratory movements and human trafficking, founder in 2002 of the NGO Caminando Fronteras, has therefore decided to make public what she considers to be real persecution. His fault, having denounced in his book Frontier Woman, published in 2020, the abuses of the Moroccan and Spanish police and the European agency Frontex. Helena Maleno had already been prosecuted in 2018, without follow-up, for having saved exiles from drowning in the Mediterranean. It is supported by around thirty left-wing MEPs and environmentalists, by numerous NGOs, as well as by personalities, including actor Javier Bardem.

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