Italian ship accused of returning migrants to Libya

Italy is being accused of violating international law after an Italian towboat is said to have rescued 108 migrants and returned them to Libya.

According to Spanish charity Proactiva Open Arms, the Asso 28 boat rescued the migrants from international waters on 30 July and took them to Libya, which is considered an unsafe country of departure for migrants.

The European Commission said that it was in contact with Rome to investigate the case.

“Libya is not a port of safety and this act could be a violation of international law,”

Commission spokesperson Natasha Bertaud said. “We cannot comment on the specific case without knowing the details of this operation and under what authority the ships operate,” Bertaud added.

The UN Refugee Agency said on 31 July that it was looking into the case. “We are collecting all the necessary information about the case of the Italian ship Asso Ventotto, which reportedly took back 108 people rescued in the Mediterranean to Libya,” UNHCR Italy said via Twitter.

According to Proactiva, their rescue boat, the Open Arms, intercepted radio communications between the Italian ship and the Libyan authorities, alerting the Open Arms’ crew of a boat in distress and indicating that the rescue occurred in international waters. The claim was supported by Nicola Fratoianni, an Italian politician with the Free and Equal party, who was on board Proactiva’s Open Arms rescue ship.

In a Facebook post, Italy’s far-right Foreign Minister Matteo Salvini wrote: “The Italian coastguard has not coordinated and participated in any of these operations, as falsely declared by a foreign NGO and a poorly informed leftist MP.”

In another, seemingly contradictory, post on Twitter, Salvini said: “The NGOs protest and the traffickers lose business? Fine, we’ll continue in this direction!”

Italian Transport Minister Danilo Toninelli also denied the accusations. “The only thing I can say is that the Italian Coast Guard was not involved in the coordination of the rescue, so it did not give any directions,” Toninelli said. “Therefore, international law was not violated,” he added.

The Italian coastguard said the rescue “took place under the coordination of the Libyan Coast Guard, which managed the whole operation.” It later clarified that the operation had taken place in Libya’s so-called “search and rescue” area. The search and rescue area is not clearly defined but is widely understood to extend far beyond Libya’s national waters.

The Asso 28’s owners said the rescue activities were coordinated by the Libyan coastguard and that the request to rescue the migrants in distress, some 2.5 kilometres from the oil rig that the boat was working with, came from Libya.

However, a spokesman for the UN migration agency IOM said the Libyans, who first told him that the rescue operation was carried out by “an unknown vessel”, later changed their version and said the rescuing vessel was Libyan. The Asso 28 is now docked in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.

TMP – 17/08/2018