Darius Minor
On board the ‘Geo Barents’
Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 18:17
The Geo Barents, the ship chartered by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to rescue migrants who risk their lives crossing the Central Mediterranean to try to reach Europe, can now sail again. The Salerno court on Wednesday lifted the detention that had been imposed on the ship since August 26, when Italian authorities ordered it to be held in the port of this southern Italian city for sixty days for allegedly violating maritime safety regulations during a rescue.
MSF lawyers filed an urgent appeal last Friday against that decision, based on the controversial decree approved by Giorgia Meloni’s government to make it more difficult for humanitarian ships to rescue migrants in the Channel of Sicily. This was the twenty-third time (three of which involved the ‘Geo Barents’) that an NGO ship had been detained since the controversial law came into force at the beginning of 2023. It is known as the ‘Piantedosi decree’ after the surname of the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Piantedosi, its main promoter.
«We are ready to return to sea as soon as the court allows us to do so,» explained Ricardo Martínez, coordinator of the ship’s operations, shortly before the news of the lifting of the arrest. In a meeting with this newspaper on board the ‘Geo Barents’, this man from Toledo who has been with MSF for sixteen years denounced the impact of the ‘Piantedosi decree’: «In addition to these arbitrary detentions, we are forced to return to port every time we carry out a rescue, even though we have the capacity to carry out more. And on top of that, they assign us very far away from where we are for the landings. We will have sailed in this way in vain for some 60,000 kilometres, spending a total of four months without being able to carry out rescue operations in the Mediterranean.»
An immediate consequence of the criminalisation of the work carried out by NGO ships is the reduction of their presence in the ‘hot zone’ of the migration route of the Sicilian Channel, located south of the Italian island of Lampedusa. In fact, in recent days there has not been a single humanitarian ship in the Central Mediterranean trying to rescue people sailing from Libya or Tunisia.
‘Sea Watch 5’
In addition to the recently completed detention of the Geo Barents, the Sea Watch 5 is also being held: it will have to remain immobilised for twenty days in the port of Civitavecchia, in the centre of the country, where it disembarked 289 people at the beginning of the month. “What is happening with the detention of humanitarian ships is part of a pattern that we see in European policies to criminalise and punish those who lend a hand to people who die at sea. Europe tries to seal its borders so that people from outside do not come, but that is not the solution. Every day there are deaths at sea. Does it make sense that we have a medical team with its hands tied while shipwrecks continue?” asks Christos Christou, president of MSF.
According to United Nations data, so far in 2024, 1,116 people have died or gone missing while crossing the Central Mediterranean, which is once again confirmed as the most dangerous migration route in the world. There were 2,192 in the same period of the previous year. This decrease is also recorded in the number of landings in Italy: since the beginning of 2024 and until this Wednesday, 44,495 migrants and asylum seekers have arrived in Italian ports, 60% less than in the same period of 2023. The drop is the result of the agreements reached by the European Union and Italy with Libya, Tunisia and Egypt to strengthen controls at their borders in exchange for money, patrol boats and other investments.
«Europe is trying to close the door on the sea by handing over control of its borders to Libya, a country where serious crimes against humanity have been reported. The people we rescue are not those who want to come to Europe, they are fleeing the indescribable terror they face in their countries and in Libya,» says Martínez. «We are talking about extortion, rape, arbitrary crimes, the sale of human beings, forced labour and slavery…», he explains while showing the different facilities of the ‘Geo Barents’.
The ship has the capacity to accommodate up to a thousand migrants at a time and has a team of 22 MSF members including rescuers, doctors, midwives and cultural mediators, among other specialties. The most emotional area is the one for women and children, decorated with countless drawings and messages from the rescued children. “Maintaining the ship and all the staff costs about 20,000 euros a day from our members’ dues and it makes us very angry that we have to waste so much time without doing rescues because of the ‘Piantedosi decree’, which is an economic suffocation for NGOs,” denounces the coordinator of the ‘Geo Barents’ operations. Since May 2021, this ship has saved 12,341 people in 186 different rescues, as can be seen on the blackboard hanging in one of its rooms.
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