Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni opened the new year of 2023, on the very 1st of January, with the adoption of a new decree (Italian Decree-Law 1/2023) which imposes relevant obstacles to the work of NGOs that provide search and rescue of migrants at sea. Over the past years, the Italian government attempted on multiple occasions to contribute to the promotion of the vilification of migrants’ rescuers. Behind the enforcement of such policies there was indeed the intent to neutralise international law obligations and normalise inhumanity towards migrants. Now, this new decree significantly furthered these efforts.
An Hidden Approach to Limit Humanitarian Efforts?
With the 2023 decree, Giorgia Meloni’s government took further steps to dissuade rescuing migrants at sea. The latter now requires NGO rescue ships to notify Italian authorities immediately after the rescue, to reach land at the assigned port by officials “without delay”, and to inform the rescued migrants about the possibility to claim asylum and to share data collection with the relevant state authorities.
Firstly, the controversial trait of this provisions lies with the question of responsibility for processing international protection claims. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), such responsibility falls on the state “whose territorial jurisdictions or effective control asylum seekers finds themselves”. Placing the responsibility on the State guarantees that the highest legal and procedural standards will be put in place. To ensure this, the processing of asylum claims must not be pursued at sea, rather on the land after all the disembarkation procedures have been finalised and all the rescued people are in a safe place. Secondly, what is controversial about the decree lies in the obligation of NGOs to reach the port of disembarkation assigned by the authorities “without delay” after the completion of the rescue operations. Because of this duty, NGOs are prevented from carrying out more than one rescue at the time during the same mission unless authorised to do so by Italian authorities, and thus are obliged to ignore any other calls of distress. Thirdly, it is crucial to note that the assigned ports are often far from the ship’s location at the time of rescue. For instance, the Italian government often assigns ports in the central and northern part of Italy, both very distant from the southern places of rescue and which entail considerably longer journeys for the ships with survived migrants onboard.
Violation of the provisions in the decree is punished with an administrative sanction up to € 50,000, coupled with the automatic impounding of the ship. These strict requirements clearly aim to limit the humanitarian efforts of rescue ships. As such, this new measure goes against the principles of EU and international law, including the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC), and 1980 The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), establishing a legal obligation on authorities and actors to render assistance to all people in distress, including to carry out multiple rescues if necessary.
The Decree in Practice
On January 1, 2024, the migrant rescue ship “Ocean Viking” authorised by the NGO “SOS Méditerranée” was punished in light of the decree. The boat was impounded and detained by Italian authorities for breaking the rules of the decree after disembarking 244 people rescued in the Libyan search and rescue zone in the Mediterranean Sea a few days earlier. According to authorities, the ship deviated from its designated course to the Bari harbour, a city in Puglia situated in Italy’s Adriatic coast, in order to respond to another distress call. Upon arrival in Bari, the Ocean Viking’s crew received a 20-day detention order for the ship as well as a € 3,300 fine. Moreover, a few days before, while the Ocean Viking was conducting rescue activities in the Libyan and Maltese search and rescue zones, the ship was forced to disembark at the port of Ravenna, which is located all the way in northern Italy, after four days of navigation. Again, fully in contrast with the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue establishes that “[…] the Party should authorize immediate entry into or over its territorial sea or territory of rescue units of other Parties […]”. It is inhumane to expect a charity vessel to delay dismemberment with hundreds of rescued survivors onboard that had been stranded at sea for days.
Fostering a Culture of Collective Indifference
Since 2015, Italy suspended the Mare Nostrum operation, which aimed at involving government into tackling the humanitarian emergency in the Strait of Sicily and safeguarding human life at sea. This scenario led to the establishments of hotspots enabling systematic fingerprinting of everyone who reached Europe (by any means necessary, including violence), security controls, and blocking secondary movements. All these recent legal reforms undoubtedly affected the legal guarantees for asylum seekers. This new non-rescue policy represents a further act of criminalisation of migrant solidarity in Italy. The paradox lies in the fact that human rights defenders are being depicted as a criminal network rather than a solidarity one. Despite the international humanitarian positive duty to render assistance at sea to strangers in distress in various international norms, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1989 International Convention on Salvage and the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, solidarity is being treated as crime while thousands of deaths keep happening in the Mediterranean as a consequence of refusal to assist from numerous fleets in the area.
With the increasing in-depth investigations, the onboard searching, the espionage from the state and the false propaganda being made against them via the media, the state attempts to orchestrate criminality. Such vilification contributes to portray NGO humanitarian work as a “pull factor” for irregular migration, and the Italian government institutionalised such hostility against migrants with the adoption of this decree. The systematic technique of governing that imposes administrative sanctions to punish rescuers of these “undesired” people employs a liberal technique that leads to a so-called “collective indifference” to human suffering within the society. Rather than using coercion or force, governments act within a scenario of freedom, where the indifference initiated by top-down legal strategies (through norms) is gradually internalised by citizens. This aims at producing a conforming population which act according to this legalised framework allowing for a prescribed form of action which distinguishes between worthy and unworthy lives, making it evident that norms do not live independently but are imposed in and affect a wider societal context. Categorising among human beings creates stigmatization and public distrust toward these population, and this is certainly what many politicians have worked on. In particular, the Lega party and its head Matteo Salvini, the current Minister of Infrastructures and Transports, insistently promotes the perception of asylum seekers and those who act to protect human rights as “criminals” and “illegal”, upholding the xenophobic and racist criminalised view of migrants. Remarkable is Salvini’s blunt definition of people aiding foreigners at sea as “enemies of Italians”.
This indeed is not an isolated incident, and sentiments against migrants are increasingly encouraged by conservative and right-wing parties around Europe. Instead of promoting cooperation between the different social actors involved in the rescue of migrants, the Italian and other European governments take a blunt position of detachment from the tragic reality of migration in the Mediterranean and blatantly demonstrate an unwillingness to abide by international human rights law.
By The European Institute for International Law and International Relations
