Icon: enlarge
"Sea-Watch 4" in the port of Palermo (archive picture)
Photo: Chris Grodotzki / dpa
The previous deployment balance of the sea rescue ship "Sea-Watch 4" has so far been rather clear.
After being commissioned by the United4Rescue alliance and the Sea-Watch aid organization last August, the ship only went on a few missions.
A good month later, the "Sea-Watch 4" was arrested in the Italian port of Palermo in Sicily.
Until now.
As the distress rescuers announced, the ship was allowed to sail again.
Italian authorities had alleged security deficiencies.
After a long legal tug-of-war, the administrative court in the Sicilian capital granted Sea-Watch's application for provisional clearance, explained a spokeswoman in Berlin.
The ship will be on its way to a shipyard for inspections - presumably to Spain.
EKD chairman Bedford-Strohm "delighted"
The "Sea-Watch 4" is operated by a broad alliance of helpers, including the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD).
The EKD chairman Heinrich Bedford-Strohm was delighted: The clearance was "urgently needed", he explained according to a message: "In the first few weeks of this year alone 185 people drowned in the central Mediterranean."
According to Sea-Watch, the court's clearance is provisional because the case was referred to the European Court of Justice at the end of 2020.
It is also about clarifying which country can judge the safety of a humanitarian ship: Does the decision on this lie with the host country or with the so-called flag state, in this case Germany.
Sea-Watch pointed out that another ship, the "Sea-Watch 3", on Tuesday with 363 boat migrants on board, was waiting off Sicily for a safe harbor to be assigned.
The use of civil rescue ships in the Mediterranean - mostly off Libya - is politically controversial.
Icon: The mirror
fek / dpa
