The president of medical charity Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières, MSF) has accused Italy’s hard-right government of seeking to criminalise humanitarian aid to drowning refugees. This comes as a court suspended authorities’ blockage of its ship.

The organisation’s search and rescue vessel, the Geo Barents, has been at port in Salerno, Italy, for two weeks. The ship was placed under administrative detention by Italian authorities, a decision MSF have appealed.

On Wednesday afternoon, that appeals court suspended the order. An MSF spokesperson confirmed to Agence France-Presse (AFP) that this ruling allows the Geo Barents to be “free to return to the Mediterranean.”

Desperate refugees Doctors Without Borders want to help

Ahead of the decision, MSF’s president surgeon Christos Christou, said Italy’s accusations that the group had failed to provide timely information to coordinating authorities during multiple rescues it carried out on August 23 were baseless.

He accused Italy of creating obstacles to saving refugees in the Mediterranean, and told AFP:

I felt I had to come here (to Salerno) to advocate about how unfair it is to detain the Geo Barents for 60 days while there is so much happening in the Mediterranean

Under Italy’s law, vessels operated by rescue charities are obliged to only perform one rescue at a time. It’s a system the groups claim is inefficient and puts lives at risk.

Christou said that on August 23, having just completed a rescue and following instructions from Italian authorities to head to port, it witnessed another refugee boat in distress and went to help. He said:

People were jumping into the sea. They were there, helpless, without any life vests.

We were trying to contact the Libyan coast guard again but there was no response. Looking at the people in the sea, in that moment the only thing you must do is to offer a hand and pull them out of the sea.

‘Pattern of obstacles’

The detention of the Geo Barents was the ship’s third such blockage under an Italian decree-law from January 2023 that has also led to the seizure of rescue ships from humanitarian charity groups such as France’s SOS Mediterranee and Germany’s Sea-Eye and Sea-Watch for periods up to 60 days.

Like Wednesday’s decision by the Salerno appeals court, other courts have similarly overturned such detention orders, most recently in June.

Christou said Italy’s detentions of NGO rescue vessels fit a “pattern of measures and ways to create obstacles to what we do in the Mediterranean”. He continued:

With this government in Italy we can clearly see the intention: they really want to criminalise the humanitarian aid provided by civil sea rescue ships.

Ahead of the court ruling, the interior ministry spokesman declined to comment to AFP on the matter.

Italy’s interior minister Matteo Piantedosi has previously said the “rules of conduct” for the charity ships are intended to “make their activity more functional” in coordination with Italy’s coastguard, which rescues the bulk of refugees.

Rescue groups are also ordered to disembark refugees at faraway ports, adding to time and cost.

Since 2017, Italy and the UN-backed Libyan government in Tripoli have partnered on a controversial EU-endorsed refugee deal. Human rights groups say it pushes thousands of refugees back to Libya to face torture and abuse under arbitrary detention.

Dead and missing

The crossing from North Africa to Italy or Malta in the central Mediterranean is the world’s deadliest migration route. At least 2,526 refugees died or went missing there last year, and at least 1,116 this year so far.

That is out of the estimated 212,100 refuges who made the crossing, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The group has counted more than 17,000 dead or missing since 2014.

The number of refugees crossing the central Mediterranean has dropped by about a third this year, according to border agency Frontex.

But refugees are opting to cross to Europe using new, dangerous routes, said Christou, citing surges this year in routes from Africa to Greece or to the Canary Islands, leading to “more people dying.”

Those routes “were not on our radar until recently,” he said.

The European Union, Christou said, “is failing in providing collective solutions”, with most funding for migration going to security measures rather than humanitarian ones. He explained:

More drones, more fences, more coastguard… instead of humanity and treating people with human dignity.

Christou’s comments and the actions of organisations looking to save drowning refugees should be the responsibility of governments. However, Fortress Europe is more invested, as Christou argues, in drones and fences that police its borders and have coastguards that watch people die. Protecting borders instead of people can only ever be cruel and callous.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Reuters

By The Canary

This post was originally published on Canary.