Saving lives in the Mediterranean, a sea of ​​obstacles for NGOs

At 2:06 p.m. on Friday, April 28, four members of the crew of the

, the maritime rescue sailboat of the Spanish NGO Open Arms, removed the lifeless body of a man from the ship while the employee of a funeral home, a doctor, watched coroner and four members of the Italian Coast Guard.

Stationed at the entrance to the port of Lampedusa, the agents received the body and deposited it in a wooden coffin.

The only comment that was heard was from the health worker, when she opened the zipper of the shroud and observed inside: "Unrecognizable", she declared.

the

sailed with a dead body on board for 24 hours.

Chrys Basso, the team's cook, was the first to spot it through binoculars in the blue immensity of the central Mediterranean, Friday at noon.

It didn't look like a drum or a tire like those left in the vicinity of where boat rescues are carried out, so Basso asked

his zodiac companions over the

The answer came after a few minutes: “I confirm.

It is the body of a man."

Italy is experiencing an increase in arrivals that has not occurred since 2017. The emergency channel of Radio Lampedusa is busy 24 hours a day and the Coast Guard does not seem to be able to cope.

Because we must not forget the other account, that of the living: more than 46,000 people who have emigrated from the North African coasts in a boat so far this year and have been rescued.

Of these, 36,000 have reached Italian shores.

This rebound prompted the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni to approve a "state of immigration emergency" a month ago that allows it to make decisions without going through Parliament and that includes measures to facilitate expulsions.

"The declaration comes because [the Minister of Transport and former head of the Interior] Matteo Salvini dismantled the reception system and the Coast Guard," says Óscar Camps,

In this context, NGOs denounce that they cannot work, weighed down by a string of regulations that go beyond international law.

They remember how the Salvini government declared war on them in 2018, as soon as they won the elections.

“Since 2015, all our movements had always been ordered by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (CCRM) and there was no problem.

We were rescuing 4,000 people in one day and no one ever complained.

Then it was all over.

Now they are like headless chickens”, continues Camps.

Since the corpse was sighted, the crew of the

He tried to get some authority to take care of the deceased.

First, with Malta, since the ship was sailing through waters under his jurisdiction.

There was no response and they tried Italy.

"They tell us that they have many boats to help, let's wait," reported the head of mission, Esther Camps, after contacting the CCRM.

The corpse was that of an adult male, dressed in an orange coat and stuck in a tire tube that he must have used as a float.

He lay doubled over on himself with his head submerged.

Due to his advanced state of decomposition, he must have died at least 48 hours earlier.

In the last 10 days, 300 people have died or disappeared in the waters of the central Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration.

That body rocked by the waves adds to the macabre number.

The culmination of the problems of the NGOs took place on January 2, with the approval of a decree that has even earned the disapproval of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

One of the measures is to assign distant ports to disembark the rescued.

“We asked to go to Lampedusa, since it was the closest, but the CCRM assigned us Taranto, 61 hours away.

ship, described by email

.

Also to

, from the organization SOS Humanity, was asked to travel to the port of Ravenna, more than 1,600 kilometers from his location.

These two organizations and the German Sea-Eye have initiated legal actions against Italy for "the systematic and illegitimate assignment of distant ports," their representative, Wasil Schauseil, also expressed through an email.

The lifeless body of a man floats in Maltese waters in the central Mediterranean on Thursday, April 27, 2023. Around 300 people have died or disappeared on this migration route in the previous 10 days, according to the International Organization for Migration. (IOM). Álvaro García

The lifeguards of the sailboat 'Astral', from the NGO Open Arms, put on their protective suits to remove the body from the water, which they themselves found during their search and rescue efforts for migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

Since the beginning of its work, in 2015, this civil organization calculates that it has rescued more than 60,000 people in the central Mediterranean.Álvaro García

Maitane Carnero, patron saint of the sailboat 'Astral', prepares the zodiac with which they will go to pick up the lifeless body found floating in the sea.

NGOs and the Italian Coast Guard work tirelessly to rescue the shipwrecked people left by this dangerous migratory route.

The IOM estimates that around 27,000 people have died or disappeared in these waters since 2014. Álvaro García

The patron saint of the 'Astral', Maitane Carnero, and the captain, Savvas Kourepinis, approach the place where the lifeless body of a man floats to put it on the zódiac and from there transport it to the sailboat.

The NGO Open Arms rescued another 150 people in the last week, all alive. Álvaro García

The crew of the 'Astral' lifts the lifeless body rescued at sea.

The corpse was placed in a shroud and in order to bring it up they had to use two corporals and the force of four people, and it was recovered late in the afternoon, after the members of the NGO waited hours to obtain any instructions from the Italian or Maltese authorities.

alvaro garcia

The lifeless body rescued from the sea lies at the stern of the ship.

The Open Arms crew first notified the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Center because they are their usual contact in rescue work.

They also tried it with Malta because the body was found in Maltese territorial waters, but no one from this country answered their calls.

alvaro garcia

The corpse remained several hours in the water until the crew of the 'Astral' obtained the go-ahead from the Italian authorities to remove it.

Due to the state of decomposition, the body, of an adult male, had been in the water for at least two days.

alvaro garcia

The crew of the 'Astral' and the troops of the Italian Coast Guard transfer the body to the mainland, in the port of the island of Lampedusa.

It was the day after the discovery of the body when the members of the NGO finally received authorization to deliver it.

The drowned man was later transported in a hearse to the island hospital, where an autopsy would be performed.

alvaro garcia

In fact, SOS Humanity has documented all the operations, both its own and those of other organizations, since December 2022. In none of them was Lampedusa or any port in Sicily determined as the destination, which are the closest to the search and rescue area from Italy, Malta, Tunisia and Libya, where all the shipwrecks occur.

, by telephone

. the rescue ship of Doctors Without Borders.

MSF and other humanitarian organizations also denounce the practice of "selective" disembarkation, for which critical moments were experienced in November.

Authorities only admitted 357 people rescued by the

, leaving 215 on board for two more days.

At that time, the port blockade policy was also applied, one of the electoral promises of the Italian extreme right, which caused three other NGOs to have to wait several days to obtain permission to disembark.

Between the four they added 1,080 people collected at sea.

Due to a similar situation that occurred in 2019, Open Arms has brought the then Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, to court, accused of the “kidnapping” of the migrants they had taken from the water.

The legal process is still ongoing.

57 legal proceedings against NGOs

Another controversial point in the new Italian standard arises from the obligation of ships to go immediately to port after each action, something that delays rescue operations, since these ships usually carried out more than one rescue in several days.

The detention of members of NGOs, administrative sanctions, fines and inspections have been analyzed by the EU office for human rights, FRA, which has recorded 57 legal proceedings against organizations dedicated to rescue in the Mediterranean between 2016 and June 2022. Of these, 34 ended in acquittal;

three, in convictions, and 18 are pending.

Most are decided in Italian courts, but there are also cases pending in Spain, Malta, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands.

Faced with the discourse of the "pull effect" of the work of these NGOs, the principal investigator of the ISPI (Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale), Matteo Vila, recently published some numbers that show how, in a context of arrivals like the current one, these organizations only rescued about 8% of those people.

In the same period of the previous year, with fewer arrivals, NGOs were involved in 21% of rescue operations.

In the midst of such a tidal wave of restrictions, the CCRM itself has been forced to ask NGOs for help, something that has not been seen for more than five years.

The

was the last ship to be required by the authorities to come to the aid of a small boat that ended up sinking with 47 people on board.

The sailing ship

, from the NGO Resqship, intervened on April 9, when the Italian Coast Guard asked them to find another vessel.

"There were too many requests for help and they had reached the limit of their capacities," says their spokesperson, Andrea Finker.

They saved 22 people and recovered two bodies, but the survivors claimed that 20 more had drowned while waiting.

On April 26 and 28, this organization received new notices to deal with two other shipwrecks.

For Gil, from MSF, these episodes are also due to the fact that after the Crotona tragedy, in which more than 90 people died in February, no more can be allowed on Italian shores.

"It is very evident that this occurred due to negligence, due to omission of rescue," he says.

corpse on deck

It was hard for someone to take responsibility for the body that the

recovered .

It was late afternoon in the central Mediterranean, the same day of the find, and it was still in the water.

The CCRM insisted on the captain, Savvas Kourepinis, to keep waiting because there was a lot of work to rescue the living.

Since with the arrival of night it was going to be more difficult to locate it, they obtained the go-ahead to put it on the sailboat.

The operation was carried out with all the precautions and was not without difficulty.

Once out of the water, the man was carefully wrapped in a shroud and deposited in the bow.

A few hours later, they received news that a Coast Guard launch was approaching to pick up the body and 21 young people of Tunisian origin that

had also located, but when they arrived, in the middle of the night, they refused to take care of the deceased and They left.

Again, Kourepinis asked for instructions and the order this time was to help locate more boats and report their positions.

The anonymous drowned man, meanwhile, spent the night on deck.

On Friday morning, the radio kept spitting out

, but the

was unable to answer them: they had finally obtained permission to sail to Lampedusa and deliver the body recovered from the sea.

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