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Italy’s coastguard races to rescue 1,300 migrants in the Mediterranean

Italian coastguard authorities were rushing to save some 1,300 migrants in the Central Mediterranean on Friday, just two weeks after a deadly shipwreck killed more than 70 people.

Published: 10 March 2023 18:11 CET

Italian coast guard at sea

Italy's coastguard was involved in emergency rescue operations on Friday, March 10th. Photo by Alessandro FUCARINI / AFP

Photographs released by the coastguard showed three overcrowded boats heading towards the southern region of Calabria.

The massive rescue operation came as Italy’s right-wing government defended itself from accusations that it failed to prevent a deadly shipwreck that killed over 70 people last month.

Friday’s operations were “particularly complex due to the large number of people present on board the drifting boats”, the coastguard said.

The navy said one of its ships was “proceeding at maximum speed” to help the coastguard, which it said was “in difficulty”.

READ ALSO: Italian PM vows to crack down on traffickers at migrant shipwreck site

Rescuers were assisting one boat with an estimated 500 people on board some 70 nautical miles (129.64 km) south off Crotone, the coastguard said.

Others were assisting two other boats further south, off Roccella Ionica.

At least 73 people died in a shipwreck near Crotone in the early hours of February 26th, after an overcrowded boat which had set off from Turkey sank in stormy weather.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government has recently denied responsibility for the disaster amid accusations it treated the boat rescue as a law enforcement issue rather than a humanitarian emergency.

READ ALSO: ‘Political stunt’: Protests as Italian ministers visit deadly migrant shipwreck site

Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, which won national elections last year, has promised to curb arrivals, but Italy has recently seen a sharp rise in the number of migrants attempting to reach its shores.

The interior ministry says more than 17,500 people have arrived by sea so far this year – almost three times the number for the same period last year.

The number of arrivals through the Central Mediterranean route rose by 116 percent in January and February compared to the same period last year, EU border agency Frontex said Friday.

And the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa, which sits some 113 kilometres off the North-African coast, recorded 41 boat arrivals on Thursday, a record number for one day, according to Italian media reports.

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Italy joins countries calling for asylum centres outside EU

The countries presented their joint stance in a letter dated May 15th to the European Commission, which was made public on Thursday.

It was sent less than a month before European Parliament elections across the 27-nation European Union, in which far-right anti-immigration parties are forecast to make gains.

Italy, Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania signed the letter.

In it, they ask the European Union’s executive arm to “propose new ways and solutions to prevent irregular migration to Europe”.

They want the EU to toughen its asylum and migration pact, which introduces tighter border controls and seeks to expedite the deportation of rejected asylum-seekers.

The pact, to be operational from 2026, will speed up the vetting of people arriving without documents and establish new border detention centres.

The 15 countries also want to see mechanisms to detect and intercept migrant boats and take them “to a predetermined place of safety in a partner country outside the EU, where durable solutions for those migrants could be found”.

They said it should be easier to send asylum seekers to third countries while their requests for protection are assessed.

They cited as a model a controversial deal Italy has struck with Albania, under which thousands of asylum-seekers picked up at sea can be taken to holding camps in the non-EU Balkan country as their cases are processed.

READ ALSO: Italy approves controversial Albanian migrant deal

The European Commission said it would study the letter, though a spokeswoman, Anitta Hipper, added that “all our work and focus is set now on the implementation” of the migration and asylum pact.

Differences with UK-Rwanda model

EU law says people entering the bloc without documents can be sent to an outside country where they could have requested asylum – so long as that country is deemed safe and the applicant has a genuine link with it.

That condition differentiates it from a scheme set up by non-EU Britain under which irregular arrivals will be denied the right to request asylum in the UK and sent instead to Rwanda.

Rights groups accuse the African country – ruled with an iron fist by President Paul Kagame since the end of the 1994 genocide that killed around 800,000 people – of cracking down on free speech and political opposition.

The 15 nations said they want the EU to make deals with third countries along main migration routes, citing the example of the arrangement it made with Turkey in 2016 to take in Syrian refugees fleeing war.

Camille Le Coz, associate director of the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, said: “In legal terms, these models pose many questions and are very costly in terms of resource mobilisation and at the operational level.”

The opening date for migrant reception centres in Albania set up under the deal with Italy had been delayed, she noted.

With the June 6th-9th EU elections leading to a new European Commission, the proposals put forward by the 15 countries would go into the inbox of the next commission for it to weigh them, she said.

She also noted that EU heavyweights France, Germany and Spain had not signed onto the letter.

“For certain member countries, the priority really is the implementation of the pact, and that in itself is already a huge task,” Le Coz said.

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