Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during her year-end press conference in Rome December 29, 2022. TIZIANA FABI / AFP
During the late summer election campaign, Giorgia Meloni, leader of Italy’s far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, revived the idea of a sea blockade to stop boats intervening at sea to rescue migrants. A solution that cannot be used in practice, but pays off in political communication. Ms. Meloni’s government, now in place at the head of the country, has nonetheless made good on its promise to regulate migration flows with a measure tantamount to a declaration of war on NGOs working to rescue migrants. On January 3, a new “code of conduct” for humanitarian vessels came into effect in the form of an executive order.
Among the novelties of this text is the end of the “simultaneous” relief actions. Once a ship has been assigned a port of disembarkation by the Italian authorities, it must be reached immediately in order for the rescue operation to be completed. No longer an issue, unless there is a specific request from the Italian authorities that a boat that has just picked up refugees will divert its route to another boat in distress until it touches land. In short, the new Interior Ministry regulations confirm a postponement that poses a clear threat to the law of the sea and the international conventions that Italy has signed.
This security tightening has caused outrage and concern among NGOs. “Rather than giving us a clear role in saving lives at sea, this decree seeks to narrow our field of action without proposing an alternative solution,” laments Juan Matias Gil, head of sea rescue operations for Doctors Without Borders (MSF). “We can expect a decrease in our rescue capacity and more deaths. »
NGOs interfere
Also new is that the government is now obliging NGOs to collect asylum applications on board rescue ships so that the administrative process is handled by the country whose flag the ships are flying. A procedure that promises many legal headaches. If we comply with the new standards, who will stop Somali migrants from seeking asylum in Rome if they are picked up by an Italian merchant ship off the coast of Mogadishu?
Fear of the “draught,” the usual rhetoric used by members of the executive branch and the majority to justify the restrictions, has been raised again by politicians who believe humanitarian ships are “taxi of the sea.” However, statistics show the opposite: of the almost 100,000 migrants who landed on the Italian coasts in 2022, little more than 10% were apprehended by NGOs.
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