Italy: More than a thousand people rescued from the Mediterranean Sea - also several dead recovered

Created: 07/24/2022, 22:20

By: Bettina Menzel

The crew of the Sea-Watch 3 hands out life jackets to people in a rubber dinghy trying to get to Europe (July 24, 2022).

© Nora Boerding/Sea-Watch via AP/dpa

Over the weekend, more than a thousand people were rescued from the Mediterranean Sea off Italy.

But for five people, any help came too late.

ROME - The Italian Coast Guard rescued nearly 700 migrants from the Mediterranean Sea on Saturday.

Private sea rescuers took around 450 more people on their ships.

According to the Italian authorities on Sunday, five people could only be recovered dead.

Italy's coast guard and sea rescue organizations save a thousand people

Within a few hours, more than a thousand people arrived in Italy by sea over the weekend.

They went ashore in several Sicilian ports.

On Saturday, a merchant ship and the coast guard rescued more than 600 people from a fishing boat off the southern Italian region of Calabria, some directly out of the water.

Five bodies were also found in the fishing boat, the Italian coast guard announced on Sunday.

Late on Saturday evening, 522 people on 15 boats from Tunisia and Libya also reached the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa.

According to aid organizations, hundreds of other people rescued from distress at sea are waiting to go ashore.

According to its own statements, the Berlin-based non-governmental organization (NGO) Sea-Watch saved over 400 people in four missions on Saturday, including a heavily pregnant woman, a person with severe burns and several children.

"With 444 guests on board, the Sea-Watch 3 is now on its way north and hopes to be assigned a safe port soon," the organization said on Instagram on Sunday.

That's how many people made it across the Mediterranean to Italy that year

According to the Interior Ministry in Rome, 34,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy since the beginning of the year.

In the previous year there were 25,500 people, in 2020 - the year when the corona pandemic began - 10,900 came.

According to Italian media, the initial reception center on Lampedusa, which is designed for a maximum of 300 people, is dramatically overcrowded.

According to the Ansa news agency, 1,200 people currently live there.

According to the crew, the ship "Ocean Viking" of the NGO SOS Méditerranée picked up 87 people from an "overcrowded rubber boat" off the Libyan coast, including 57 unaccompanied minors.

None of the people had been equipped with life jackets during the crossing.

On Sunday, SOS Méditerranée reported another rescue operation - in addition to the 87 people, there were now another 108 rescued on board, making a total of 195 people.

Crossing the Mediterranean is so dangerous

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Mediterranean Sea is the most dangerous flight route in the world.

According to IOM estimates, 990 people have died or disappeared on the crossing since the beginning of this year.

According to official figures, more than 21,000 people have died crossing the Mediterranean since 2014 - the number of unreported cases is likely to be significantly higher.

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More than 100 million people are currently fleeing the world, more than at any time since the Second World War.

This was announced by the UN refugee agency UNHCR in June.

Accordingly, around five million people fled solely because of the Ukraine war.

The UNHCR has developed a six-point plan to improve the refugee situation in Europe.

"All EU member states must participate in finding an effective solution," said UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. 

Time is pressing, because scientists are recognizing a connection between climate, conflicts and migration movements.

The climate crisis could therefore fuel migration movements worldwide, as researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) demonstrated in a meta-study published in the journal Nature.

Some refugees sleep on board the Sea-Watch 3 after being rescued from rickety smuggler boats with lifeboats (July 24, 2022).

© Nora Boerding/Sea-Watch via AP/dpa

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migrants and refugees?

This is how the Federal Development Ministry differentiates

When reporting on crossings across the Mediterranean, the talk is usually of migrants, not of refugees.

"International law draws a clear dividing line between migrants and refugees," according to the website of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

According to the Geneva Refugee Convention, refugees are people who flee “out of a well-founded fear of persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or because of their political opinions”.

The BMZ, on the other hand, defines migrants as people who “leave their homeland of their own accord”.

Accordingly, migrants do not fall under the international refugee protection system.

"People who get into such a boat and risk the often fatal crossing have a reason and usually no choice," says the non-governmental organization Sea-Watch on the subject.

The refugees are in acute emergency situations and are fleeing wars, persecution or poverty.

The right to asylum is a human right.

Nobody puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than land, the NGO quotes the poet Warsan Shire

.