EU under fire after migrant shipwreck

A migrant is photographed yesterday during the identification procedure after he disembarked in the Sicilian harbour of Palermo. Some 480 migrants arrived yesterday in Sicily’s Palermo, including several pregnant women, bringing the number of arrivals at the port to around 1,500 in the last 24 hours.

AFP/ReutersReggio Calabria, ItalyAmnesty International has accused the EU of putting thousands of migrants at risk by scrapping rescue operations in the Mediterranean as Italian coastguards said no more survivors have been found from a shipwreck which may have claimed 400 lives.The rights group accused Europe of “turning its back on its responsibilities and clearly threatening thousands of lives” by forcing Italy to abandon its Mare Nostrum rescue mission last year in favour of the surveillance patrols currently being carried out by its borders agency Frontex.Jean-François Dubost, Amnesty’s displaced persons director in Paris, said that the latest tragedy highlighted the “horror of nothing having been sorted out in the Mediterranean”.“In demanding an end to the Mare Nostrum rescue operation that saved 170,000 lives, and replacing it will a surveillance mission, the EU has turned its back on its responsibilities and clearly threatens thousands of lives,” he added.Italian coastguards said yesterday that no more survivors had been found from the latest migrant boat to sink.The vessel capsized off the Libyan coast on Sunday, with survivors who were brought to Italy telling charity workers that as many as 400 others perished.In a particularly tragic twist, the boat appears to have overturned because of the excitement caused by the sighting of rescuers.According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which has interviewed some of the survivors, between 500 and 550 people, many of them young, were crammed onto the vessel at the time.Joel Millman, spokesman for the IOM, said: “According to testimonies, at least one-third of the passengers were women and children. At the time of the shipwreck, they were staying in the hull of the boat to be better protected from the cold.“When the men on the deck became restless and started moving about because a rescue boat was beginning to approach them, the boat capsized and water flooded the hull. Women and children died immediately.”Another IOM spokesman, Flavio Di Giacomo, said that even before the latest sinking, more than 500 migrants, many refugees fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, had died so far this year trying to cross to Europe – 10 times the toll over the same period last year.Italian coastguards, who intercepted 42 boats on Sunday and Monday alone carrying 6,500 migrants attempting to make the hazardous crossing to Europe, confirmed that they had saved 145 people from the sunken boat and found nine bodies.Coastguard spokesman Commander Filippo Marini told AFP that they had not found any more “survivors or anything else which would indicate more victims”.He said he could not exclude that more lives had been lost, and said that the kind of vessel from which the 145 people were rescued usually carried many more people.Search operations were continuing in the area yesterday.Dubost criticised the limits placed on the Triton maritime policing operation set up by Brussels in November to replace the more humanitarian Mare Nostrum mission, which was run solely by the Italian navy for more than a year.“Only a rescue operation co-ordinated at a European level can respond to the immediate challenges we face to stop people drowning. There is no other possible solution to the problem,” he said.And Human Rights Watch added its condemnation, with Western Europe researcher Judith Sunderland saying: “The intolerable number of victims is only going to grow if the EU does not guarantee rescue operations in the Mediterranean.”Recent good weather has prompted a spike in the number of migrants attempting to reach Italy aboard boats, many of them overcrowded and unseaworthy.An increasingly violent and chaotic situation in Libya has added to the problem, with unpoliced ports allowing people smugglers a free hand.Italian authorities say more than 15,000 migrants have arrived so far in 2015.There were 15,000 in April alone last year and an average of 25,000 each month between June and September.Italy’s interior ministry has ordered regional prefects to find emergency housing for 6,500 migrants – a move condemned by the opposition, which argues the policy of rescuing immigrants encourages others to attempt the risky sea journey.Matteo Salvini, head of the anti-immigrant Northern League, on Tuesday urged local officials not to co-operate.“I ask the League’s governors, mayors, assessors and councillors to say no, with every means, to every new arrival. The League is ready to occupy every hotel, hostel, school or barracks intended for the alleged refugees,” Salvini said on Facebook.