{"id":89785,"date":"2021-03-23T11:22:39","date_gmt":"2021-03-23T11:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/03\/mediterranean-sea-refugee-crisis-eu-prosecution-for-aid\/"},"modified":"2021-03-23T11:35:35","modified_gmt":"2021-03-23T11:35:35","slug":"stop-jailing-people-for-saving-refugees-lives-in-the-mediterranean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/03\/23\/stop-jailing-people-for-saving-refugees-lives-in-the-mediterranean\/","title":{"rendered":"Stop Jailing People for Saving Refugees\u2019 Lives in the Mediterranean"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

A prosecutor in Sicily has charged twenty-one people, including the crew of the Iuventa migrant rescue ship, with aiding illegal immigration. The potential long jail terms show how European countries have criminalized aid for refugees \u2014 and how little they care about the thousands who drown in the Mediterranean.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Twenty-one people face jail for helping to save the lives of refugees on the Mediterranean Sea. (Flickr)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

In spring 2019 Italian prosecutors opened an investigation into Miguel Rold\u00e1n, a Spanish firefighter. A potential two-decade sentence was attached to his crime \u2014 namely, aiding drowning people. One of a number of such investigations into aid crews, it was part of a long war pursued by Europe\u2019s reactionaries against refugee rescue operations.<\/p>\n

Italy took a leading role in this, not least under the pugnacious Il Capitano<\/i> \u2014 the far-right Matteo Salvini, the country’s interior minister until the end of summer 2019. Rescue captains Carola Rackete and Pia Klemp were also arrested<\/a> that spring, joining two hundred fifty people arrested for similar offenses including the mayor<\/a> of a small Italian town.<\/p>\n

That autumn, Ursula von der Leyen entered the European Commission presidency. Her opening speech appeared to be a continent away from Salvini\u2019s rhetoric. She belonged to a German government who had rendered more than its fair share of humanitarian assistance. The refugee crisis was a shame upon the continent, she said. And she had skin in the game, having personally adopted and cared for a young Syrian refugee. She was cited as an example of how the right-wing populist tide could be halted across the world.<\/p>\n

But the speech turned sharply a few paragraphs later. Von der Leyen announced that Frontex, the EU\u2019s border agency, would take on thousands of new guards. One defense of this move held that their role would involve rescue \u2014 and yet, increased enforcement has already made the Mediterranean more lethal<\/a>. Worse, patrol boats are giving way to drones<\/a> which cannot carry out rescues and can only impassively observe disasters. This colossal humanitarian crisis is occurring not on the other side of the planet, but just off Europe’s beach resorts.<\/p>\n

And Von der Leyen\u2019s launch had one final sting in the tail; the gathering of migration policy under a commissioner for \u201cProtecting Our European Way of Life,\u201d a Trumpian title that sparked outrage<\/a> even in Brussels circles. Such \u201cprotection\u201d is premised, however much it publicly baulks at the consequences, on perpetuating a saltwater graveyard where six people a day<\/a> die preventable deaths, including thousands of people who died while the predominant European policy focus was on Brexit, and tens of thousands since the 1990s.<\/p>\n

It is an organism with limbs and antennae in run-down detention centers outside London and Glasgow, in the sun-drenched skies over the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, in mountain border posts in the Balkans, and in air-conditioned committee rooms in the EU’s Berlaymont HQ in Brussels.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

A Feature Not a Bug<\/h2>\n \n

Three years and a pandemic later, the case against the Iuventa<\/i>, the search-and-rescue vessel on which Rold\u00e1n once worked, is back. On March 3, 2021, the prosecutor in Trapani, Sicily officially charged twenty-one people and three organizations of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, including Rold\u00e1n and the Iuventa <\/i>crew. <\/i><\/p>\n

The charges relate to rescues carried out between 2016 and 2017, with evidence gained by undercover agents<\/a> in direct contact with Salvini, ostensibly providing \u201csecurity\u201d on rescue boats under the auspices of a security firm whose boss is linked to far-right group Generation Identity. One of these spies later expressed regret and admitted he had no evidence of a relationship between NGOs and people smugglers. If convicted, the crews could face decades in jail.<\/p>\n

This is the decision of a local prosecutor. But rather like Von der Leyen\u2019s speech, it exposes the brutal system in which a dizzying range of people and organizations are complicit. It may be tempting to view this case as a simple moral failure. But it is so much more than an unpleasant bug in the system. Across ideological divides from Von der Leyen to Salvini, and across moral frameworks and cultural backgrounds, Europe is complicit.<\/p>\n

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Refugees and migrants after being rescued at sea on June 10, 2017 off Lampedusa, Italy. Chris McGrath \/ Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Mediterranean murder machine is <\/i>the system, that reproduces itself through all of its constituent parts, along every point of the refugee journey. The far right, the mainstream right, and liberals in local and global politics; police forces, armies, and military security contractors; think tanks and academics; criminals and traffickers; all share in producing and reproducing human suffering.<\/p>\n

The most brutal, and brutally honest, component in that system is the renewed hard-right as represented by Viktor Orb\u00e1n and Matteo Salvini, or inspired by Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump further afield. In its account, those who seek a better life across the sea essentially deserve their death. This external enemy has given a narrative unity to the far right across Europe, allowing it to shift a general malaise into racism, both on the street and at the ballot box.<\/p>\n