Italian plan to end its own search and rescue operation could lead to more deaths, UN warns.
The European Union will on 1 November launch an operation off the coast of Italy to intercept migrants from North Africa seeking to reach shore.
The operation, codenamed ‘Triton’, has a monthly budget of €2.9 million and is overseen by Frontex, the EU’s border-management agency. Triton has not been designed to replace a far larger Italian operation, ‘Mare nostrum’, launched after a tragedy in October 2013 in which almost 400 migrants died off the Italian island of Lampedusa. But the Italian government has now decided to end Mare nostrum, which cost the treasury around €9m each month, with the two operations overlapping for a short time.
Cost was not the only factor in the decision to end Mare nostrum. Another reason was the Italian government’s analysis that since its vessels had operated close to the Libyan coast, the operation had created an incentive for traffickers to put migrants on vessels that were not seaworthy.
While the European Commission is stressing that Triton’s mandate includes search and rescue, it is clear that its focus is on border control. Its six ships and two fixed-wing surveillance aircraft will be complemented by five expert teams tasked with gathering intelligence on people-traffickers.
On Friday (17 October), the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, warned that replacing Mare nostrum with Triton would “undoubtedly increase the risk for those trying to find safety in Europe, and could lead to more refugees and migrants perishing at sea”. The agency said that 3,343 migrants had lost their lives trying to reach Italy this year – 2,755 since the beginning of July.
In all, some 150,000 people have been rescued by Mare nostrum. According to the International Organization for Migration, Eritreans and Syrians were the largest groups among those arriving in Italy this year, with more than 32,000 from each country since the start of the year. Syrians and Eritreans stand a strong chance of being granted temporary or permanent asylum in
Europe – if they are given the chance to submit an application for protection.
On Tuesday (21 October), the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy had violated the rights of migrants – mostly from Afghanistan – who had been summarily returned to Greece, which then denied them the right to lodge an asylum application. (Greece was also found to have violated their rights.) The asylum-seekers had arrived by ferry from Greece and were returned without any determination of whether they might need protection and whether Greece would in fact offer such protection. Under the EU’s Dublin system, asylum-seekers are supposed to lodge their application in the country through which they entered the EU, but Greece has regularly been found to be in violation of EU law. Several countries have suspended returns to Greece.