On the Ocean Viking ship during meal distribution, October 28, 2022.
(Vincenzo Circosta, Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
On November 3, a new event occurred in the history of rescues at sea: the Ocean Viking ship of the NGO Sos Méditerranée asked Spain, Greece and France to assign a port of disembarkation. Italy and Malta had not responded to the humanitarian organization that asked for permission to dock since October 26, after having rescued 234 people in various operations off the coast of Libya, the most dangerous migration route in the world in which 25 thousand people have died since 2013 .
International law provides that the rescue is concluded only when the castaways have been brought ashore and that the nearest country (in this case, therefore, Italy or Malta) is assigned a port. But for days three humanitarian ships have been stalled with almost a thousand people on board, including many minors: the Ocean Viking, the Geo Barents of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the Humanity 1 of Sos Humanity. In the next forty-eight hours bad weather is expected and the humanitarian ships are afraid that the situation on board will degenerate.
“We have not had any form of response, absolute silence. Everything we know about the positions of the new Italian government comes to us from the press, no one has communicated anything to us in an official way ”, says Lukas Kaldenhoff, spokesman for the German NGO Sos Humanity.
The new Italian interior minister Matteo Piantedosi, former head of cabinet of minister Matteo Salvini at the time of the “closed ports”, in 2018 announced that he had issued a directive warning the police and port authorities that his ministry is evaluating the ban on entry into the territorial waters of the three ships.
At the request of the French NGO Sos Méditerranée, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin replied, saying that he “does not doubt” that Italy “will respect international law” and will welcome the Ocean Viking.
“International law is very clear: when a boat asks to dock with castaways on board, it is the safest and closest port that must host it, in this case Italy,” said Darmanin. “We have told our Italian friends, together with our German friends, that we are obviously ready to welcome some of the women and children, as we have done previously, so that Italy does not take care of them alone”, added the minister. French.
But in Italy the new government led by Giorgia Meloni does not seem available and promises to return to close the ports to humanitarian ships, which in reality carry out only a part of the rescues (16 per cent of the total). Most of the migrants arrive autonomously aboard small makeshift boats, or are rescued by the Italian coast guard.
Meloni defined humanitarian ships as “pirate” ships and the Minister of the Interior Piantedosi promised to issue “a ban on entry into Italian territorial waters”, although this principle was already envisaged by the safety decree required by Matteo Salvini, which led to several controversial cases including the one involving SeaWatch commander Carola Rackete in June 2019 and the one involving the Open Arms ship in August of the same year. For the Open Arms case, Salvini is on trial in Palermo on suspicion of kidnapping. The next hearing will be held on 2 December.
On board the ships
“We are following international laws and we do not intend to ask for assistance from other European countries, because this is not in line with what international laws say”, says Petra Krischok, coordinator on board the Humanity 1 ship which is currently in the waters. international off the coast of Sicily. “We have sent nineteen requests for a safe harbor, both to the Italians and the Maltese as required by law, and we expect them to respond to us,” continues Krischok.
The coordinator says that the situation is very difficult on board: “We have more than one hundred unaccompanied minors, they are children, not children, but they travel alone and everything is really complicated. Many of them have signs of violence on their bodies, signs of torture ”.
Krischok says that among the shipwrecked “there are also witnesses of a shipwreck: the boat sank and some of those on board died, six people disappeared. It is not easy for those who have survived, there are many traumatized people. Furthermore, some of the people on board have fevers and colds and this makes the situation difficult, they are sleeping on the ground, in the open ”. Humanity 1 has been waiting for a port of landing for two weeks: “We did first aid on 22 October, the second on 24 October”. And bad weather is expected in the next few hours.
On the MSF ship Geo Barents, on the other hand, there are currently 572 people rescued in seven separate operations. Among the survivors are three pregnant women and over sixty minors, including an eleven-month-old baby girl. “We fled from Togo due to the political crisis,” says the father on the phone. “We tried to live in Niger but even there the situation was difficult and so we went to Libya. That’s where our daughter with the cleft lip was born. We tried to cure her in Libya, even by spending a lot of money, but we soon realized that it was impossible to solve her problem there. She has trouble swallowing, she needs to be operated on. We are here on this ship because we had no other choice, ”continues the man.
“We wanted to cure her in Europe, but we didn’t want to face the sea. But really, believe us, there was no other choice. During the crossing we were scared, it was scary. But we had faith and we are a family. With God’s help, everything is possible. I am a construction technician, in Libya I was a bricklayer to earn money. But I was treated like a slave, unpaid and unable to support my family. How could we continue living there? ”.
Because the ports cannot be closed
The closure of ports to humanitarian vessels runs counter to several rules of international law according to which people rescued at sea must be transported to the safe port closest to the rescue area.
The closure of ports, in the case of a ship carrying rescued migrants under the coordination of the Italian authorities, involves the violation of the Convention on the Protection of Human Life at Sea (Solas Convention, signed in London in 1974 and ratified by Italy in 1980) ; the international convention on search and rescue at sea (Sar Convention, signed in Hamburg in 1979 and ratified by Italy in 1989); the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Cnudum or Unclos Convention adopted in Montegobay in 1982 and ratified by Italy in 1994).
Furthermore, if Italy closed its ports to the people it has just rescued, it would violate Articles 2, 3 and 4 of the fourth protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights. In fact, the rescued people clearly need medical care and basic necessities (water, food, medicines) and the conditions to which they were exposed can be considered inhuman and degrading treatments (in violation of Article 3) and a serious risk for their life (in violation of Article 2).
Furthermore, as many of the passengers on the three humanitarian ships are presumably refugees or asylum seekers, it could be a violation of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention on Refugees of 1951 and Article 4 of the Fourth Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits rejections, a crime for which Italy was already sanctioned in 2012 for having sent back to Libya some Eritrean and Somali citizens who risked suffering inhuman and degrading treatment.