DİHA - Dicle News Agency

NEWS DESK (DİHA) - On the eve of an emergency summit in Brussels, Amnesty International is publishing a Blueprint for Action calling on European governments to take immediate and effective steps to end an ongoing catastrophe that has left thousands of refugees and migrants dead.

The briefing, Europe’s sinking shame: The failure to save refugees and migrants at sea, documents testimonies of shipwreck survivors. It details the challenges and limitations of current search and rescue operations in the central Mediterranean and sets out ways in which this can be remedied. It calls for the immediate launch of a humanitarian operation to save lives at sea, with adequate ships, aircraft, and other resources, patrolling where lives are at risk.

“European leaders gathering in Brussels have an historic opportunity to end a spiralling humanitarian tragedy of Titanic proportions," said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s Director for Europe and Central Asia. "Europe’s negligence in failing to save thousands of migrants and refugees who run into peril in the Mediterranean has been akin to firefighters refusing to save people jumping from a towering inferno. Governments’ responsibility must clearly be not only to put out the fire but to catch those who have stepped off the ledge.”

On Monday, in a shift from previous policy, the European Union committed to bolster search and rescue capacity and Member States must now translate this pledge into action. The briefing shows the decision to end the Italian Navy’s humanitarian operation, Mare Nostrum, at the end of 2014, has contributed to a dramatic increase in migrant and refugee deaths at sea. If figures from the latest incidents are confirmed, as many as 1,700 people will have perished this year, 100 times more than in the same period in 2014.

The myth that Mare Nostrum acted as a “pull-factor” is also dispelled by figures which show that the number of refugees and migrants attempting to cross into Europe by sea has increased since the end of the operation. Indeed 2015 has already seen record numbers of refugees and migrants attempting to cross into Europe by sea, with over 24,000 arriving in Italy. After Mare Nostrum ended, European governments instructed the EU border agency, Frontex, to set up Operation Triton.

Triton is not a search and rescue operation. Unlike Mare Nostrum’s ships whose area of operation extended south of Lampedusa for about 100 nautical miles (nm), Triton is limited to a border patrol 30nm off the Italian and Maltese coasts, far from where the vast majority of boats get into trouble. Frontex itself has admitted that its resources are “appropriate to its mandate, which is to control the EU’s borders, not to police 2.5million km2 of the Mediterranean.” Instead search and rescue operations largely fall to coast guard vessels. Admiral Giovanni Pettorino, head of the Italian coast guard's Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres, told Amnesty International that his vessels “won’t be able to take them all, if we remain the only ones to go out there.” In addition, merchant vessels play a large role in current rescue operations, although they are not designed, equipped or trained for maritime rescue. Despite all actors’ efforts, and having saved of tens of thousands of lives this year, they cannot be expected to address the magnitude of the current humanitarian crisis.

Drowning by numbers

On 18 April 2015 estimates suggest that more than 800 migrants and refugees drowned during an attempted rescue by a merchant ship. Their boat capsized as those on board surged to one side, according to the coast guard. This echoes the testimonies of survivors of other tragedies in Amnesty International’s briefing. Mohammad, a 25-year-old Palestinian man from Lebanon described how, on 4 March 2015, the boat he was on with 150 people aboard capsized when a large tug boat approached to assist them. "They threw a rope ladder...Many tried to get on it and the boat capsized …I fell into the water…Immirdan, a Syrian woman died with her one-year old son.”

(nt)