The government's new strategy against NGOs saving lives at sea

Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi has announced a new law to regulate the work of non-governmental organizations involved in search and rescue in the Mediterranean.

In an interview given to The Sheet, Piantedosi said that the regulation will be defined "in the coming weeks" and will not introduce new crimes.However, administrative sanctions will be provided for, imposed by the prefects, for those who violate the new rules:fines, administrative detentions, up to the confiscation of ships in the event of multiple violations.

However, it is not clear what the rules will consist of, nor whether it will be possible to apply them.Search and rescue activities at sea are strictly regulated by international law:any law aimed at limiting rescue activities is destined to clash with higher standards, the various international treaties on navigation safety to which Italy adheres.

For this reason, declared Piantedosi a Sky News, the government would like to create by law "clear elements of distinction" between rescue missions and "systematic searches for people who leave under the initiative of traffickers".This means, in practice, creating a two-lane navigation law:one for those who migrate, and one for the rest of the potential castaways.This is, as we will see, an ambition that has been cultivated for at least a decade by various Italian governments that have followed one another over the years.

The attempt to distinguish between castaways more or less worthy of being saved, in addition to being morally questionable, creates enormous legal and conceptual problems.Problems that have so far held back legislative interventions in this regard:the previous attempt to regulate the work of NGOs, by the Gentiloni government in 2017, took the form of a “code of conduct” with voluntary membership.Piantedosi explicitly referred to this precedent, promoted by the then Interior Minister Minniti.But he made it clear that his provision will be binding.

Previews on the content of the law were entrusted to the press - which cites "sources close to the dossier" or does not cite sources - without official press releases.From the articles published so far, three key points of the future decree can be deduced:the obligation for the crews of rescue ships to receive asylum requests from shipwrecked survivors on board;the obligation to request a port of disembarkation from the competent authorities immediately after carrying out a rescue;and the ban on carrying out rescues in the absence of "an actual danger" for the migrant vessel.

The asylum application on board the rescue ships

As reports Rai News: 

The rescuers must immediately ask those on board who have been rescued to express their interest in any application for international protection for migrants, so that the flag country of the ship is responsible for welcoming the migrant after disembarkation. .

The right, and Salvini in particular, has often argued that shipwrecked people should disembark in the country of flag of the rescue ships.This proposal is in open conflict with international law, which provides that the disembarkation of shipwrecked people takes place "in the nearest safe port".The "safe haven” is one in which shipwrecked people are guaranteed the full exercise of their rights, including the right to request asylum:for rescues in the central Mediterranean it is almost always Italy.Tunisia, often geographically closer to the rescue area, does not fully guarantee the right to asylum and is therefore not considered a safe haven.

Read also >> The government's conduct on sea rescues is inhumane.Even according to international law

The idea of ​​moving the asylum request on board the rescue ships seems to have been devised precisely to get around this problem:Italy could continue to be the main port of disembarkation for shipwrecked people from the central Mediterranean, but the flag states of the ships would then be responsible for asylum requests.The law thus intends to force the Dublin regulation, which provides that the country of first entry of the asylum seeker into the European Union must manage this practice.The country of first entry, says the government, must be considered the one to which the rescue ship belongs.

However, states have traditionally been willing to only consider asylum requests made within their own territorial borders.The decision to consider a ship as an extension of the flag state's territory, for the purposes of the right of asylum, can only be taken by the state itself.Italy cannot force a third state to accept asylum requests on board its ships in international waters.In short, to put into practice the rule announced by the Interior Ministry, the unlikely consensus of other European countries would be needed.

Furthermore, in order to express their desire to request asylum, according to the guidelines of the United Nations refugee agency, migrants must have had access to all relevant legal information and a linguistic mediation service:obligations that will be difficult to fulfill by the small crews of the rescue ships.Because of this some jurists they consider this aspect of the proposed law substantially impracticable.

The immediate request of the port of disembarkation

He still writes Rai News than after a rescue at sea

the rescuers will have to immediately request a port of disembarkation, towards which the ship will be required to head immediately after the rescue, without remaining days at sea waiting for other possible rescues.

Anyone who has participated in rescue missions in the Mediterranean knows that this is already a consolidated practice:NGOs require a port of disembarkation immediately after each rescue operation.If NGOs often find themselves carrying out various rescues during a mission, this happens because, in the period of time that passes between the request and the assignment of the port, or on the way to the port of disembarkation, new requests for rescue arrive which require immediate intervention by nearby vessels.Failure to provide assistance determines, in the event of a shipwreck, the criminal liability of the captains of the negligent ships.Furthermore, NGOs do not remain at sea for days "waiting for other possible rescues":they do so because the Italian government usually takes several days to assign a port of disembarkation.It's the strategy of the long guys."stand-off” inaugurated by Salvini and continued with Lamorgese at the Viminale.

Piantedosi's anticipations seem rather announcing the abandonment of this strategy:the government now seems intent on assigning NGO ships a disembarkation port as quickly as possible, but directing them to very distant ports.After the rescue in recent weeks, NGO ships were sent to Salerno, Bari and Livorno, several days' sail from the search and rescue area.In this way the government limits the time that NGOs spend in the central Mediterranean, and imposes higher operating costs on them (depending on the characteristics of the ship, it is estimated that a day of navigation can cost between 15 and 30 thousand euros).

Rescues only in case of "real danger"

The announcement of a new code of conduct for NGOs was made a few days after the Meloni government took office by means of indiscretions entrusted to Fiorenza Sarzanini on Corriere della Sera:

The main rule to be respected will be to intervene only when there is a real danger for migrants.In essence, it will no longer be possible to report your position to those waiting to leave from the African coast in order to make the transfer from the small boats to the NGO ships.

This, more than a rule, is outright slander, which Sarzanini should have been careful not to report uncritically:There is no evidence that NGOs ever reported their location to boats leaving Africa.Furthermore, the position of ships is public data, given that there is an obligation, essential for the safety of navigation, to transmit their position in real time through the AIS system (English acronym for Automatic Identification System).

The announcement of this pseudo-rule seems functional to convey the idea that the migrant boats rescued by NGOs are not in conditions of "actual danger".Denying, against all evidence, that the boats require rescue serves to create an alternative law of the sea for migrants:what, as has been said, seems to be the objective of the entire government operation.This was also seen in the speech of the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, at Porta a Porta:"Those we welcome are simply those who have the money to give to the smugglers, the others don't.I don't think it's an intelligent way to handle the problem of refugees and migrants", he said Melons.

In 2017 the then General Commander of the Coast Guard Vincenzo Melone explained, in a hearing of the Senate defense committee, that migrant boats are at risk of sinking from the moment of departure:

The salient data from a strictly technical profile that the migratory phenomenon presents for the purposes of exercising the SAR function can be summarized as follows:the state of periculum in re ipsa determined by the increasingly evident precariousness of the units used by migrants, completely unsuitable and dilapidated, overloaded beyond belief, devoid of crew and the most basic safety equipment.Therefore in any case in need of help and such as to require immediate intervention on the part of anyone who knows about it.That is, the unity in itself, just by seeing it, is in a condition of being rescued, because it certainly cannot carry out a prolonged navigation in time and space.

The tragic demonstration of this statement are the 25,351 people dead or missing in the Mediterranean since 2014.Nearly eight lives lost every day.A truth that the Italian authorities never wanted to hear.Melon himself, in another speech in the Chamber, recounted how in 2015, under the Renzi government, Italy had asked the International Maritime Organization (IMO) a question to find out whether international laws on rescues at sea were "still current" in the context of migrations from Libya.The IMO replied that yes, Italy had to fulfill its rescue duties even if it involved migrants.

In June 2021, with Draghi in government, it was Minister Lamorgese to speak of an "intense operational activity implemented to counter [...] the simulation of emergency situations to request rescue at sea".Lamorgese's words echoed an old wish of the Italian Navy.

It was October 23, 2013, and a few days had passed since the two devastating shipwrecks that had killed almost 600 people, including around seventy children.In a closed-door meeting at the National Anti-Mafia Directorate in Rome, revealed by the newspaper tomAndrthectonto The Intercept, Captain Covino of the Navy General Staff asked the establishment of the crime of "masked SAR", i.e. an emergency call made "for the sole purpose of shifting the responsibility for the landing of illegal immigrants onto the coastal state".A desire that the Meloni government could finally realize after almost ten years.

Preview image:Holand, CC BY-SA 4.0, go Wikimedia Commons