According to the UN and Doctors Without Borders, dozens of people drowned in the Mediterranean when a refugee boat sank.
“More than 90 people have died in another tragedy in the Mediterranean,” the head of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, Filippo Grandi, said on Twitter on Sunday. According to Doctors Without Borders, a commercial tanker truck rescued four survivors from a lifeboat on Saturday.
Those rescued reported that they had been on a boat with nearly 100 people on board for at least four days. About 96 people drowned. The overcrowded boat had left Libya for Europe.
Doctors Without Borders against repatriation
The survivors “urgently need protection and care”, said MSF. The organization demanded that they not be returned to Libya. “None of the survivors should be returned to a place where they risk imprisonment, abuse and ill-treatment.”
Libya is a major transit country for migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East who wish to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. If people are sent back to the crisis-stricken country of North Africa, they are housed in internment camps. Human rights activists have repeatedly criticized conditions in the centres.
Grandi with EU requirements
Grandi urged the EU to act: “Europe has shown that it is capable of generously and effectively hosting four million refugees from Ukraine,” he said. Now it urgently needs to think about how to apply this to other refugees and migrants in need.