Feature
For Ibrahima, the change was being able to go to work without fearing arrest. He had lived in Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott, since 2020. Getting a residence card, he told RFI in October, meant he could work and move around freely. His account was not of a document that failed him, but one that made ordinary life possible.
In the same report, Kalidou was still waiting. He had arrived three months earlier and had not received his card. Applications could be submitted only on Saturdays, he said. Why not Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays—the working week? His complaint was about reaching the administrative door, not an unwillingness to enter it. These were their experiences, recorded by RFI on 16 October 2026.
Their contrasting accounts open a different view of a country often discussed as a departure point for Europe. Mauritania is also somewhere people come to earn a living, and a refuge from neighbouring Mali’s war. Controlling an Atlantic migration route therefore reaches far beyond the beach. It shapes whether people can get to work, move through a city and establish that they are entitled to stay.
A card can change those freedoms. But obtaining it, having officials recognise it and securing a chance to challenge removal are three different encounters with state power.
Getting through the door
Regularisation is not simply an unfulfilled promise. Human Rights Watch’s August 2025 investigation records a free application campaign in 2022, during which an interior ministry official said around 136,000 people regularised their status. Requirements were reduced to encourage applications. The permits, however, lasted one year; migrants and a UN official subsequently described shifting requirements and procedures that were not always clearly set out in writing.
RFI’s October reporting supplies both a more recent success and an unresolved wait. Ibrahima said processing could sometimes take more than three or four months. Kalidou’s request for more application days identifies a practical obstacle: a requirement to obtain status is easier to announce than to make accessible. Neither account establishes what protection an application awaiting a decision provides.
Making papers count
The older record also shows why issuance is not the whole story. Human Rights Watch interviewed a Guinean driver who said police acknowledged his residence permit was valid after arresting him in February 2022, but nevertheless detained and expelled him to Mali. His account describes status recognised without preventing removal—not merely someone unable to produce identification.
Yet the same investigation documents a different outcome after another arrest that June: three women registered with the UN refugee agency were released after transfer to a detention centre. Asylum documentation and a worker’s residence permit are not interchangeable. The cases do show that verification could lead to release, as well as fail to prevent expulsion. They do not establish how frequently either happened.
Both episodes preceded the safeguards Mauritania adopted in May 2025. They cannot demonstrate that those later measures failed.
In its July 2025 response to Human Rights Watch, the government rejected allegations of systematic abuse. It said individual assessments would identify people’s actual administrative status, protection needs and risks on return. It also described an appeal mechanism being finalised, allowing documents or other evidence to justify temporarily delaying removal. That was a promised opportunity to make papers count before departure—not evidence that such an appeal had already stopped one.
Two routes through the system
Protection services have also moved beyond announcements. In June 2026, AFP visited an EU-funded reception centre, reporting food, rest, medical care and assessment for people brought ashore. Those services matter in their own right; they complicate an account in which migration cooperation produces only coercion. The EU ambassador told AFP, published by Arab News, that forced returns were not what Europe had requested and that concerns had been raised.
But a sea-reception centre is not the whole enforcement system. The government’s response said those centres would not accommodate people arrested during routine checks on land. Separately, it said vulnerable people should receive protection referrals whether intercepted at sea or arrested ashore. Different facilities did not, in its declared policy, mean an absence of obligations on land.
That distinction matters to people whose immediate destination is work, not Europe. Better reception after a crossing and accessible residence procedures address different predicaments. Ibrahima’s reported freedom shows what a card can deliver. Kalidou’s unanswered request for more application days asks who can reach that protection in the first place.