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mediterranean sea
'Unacceptable Tragedy': 10,000+ Migrants Died Trying to Reach Spain This Year
"These figures are evidence of a profound failure of rescue and protection systems," said one campaigner.
Dec 26, 2024
More than 10,000 migrants died while trying to reach Spain this year—a more than 50% increase from 2023—according to a Spanish advocacy group's annual report published this week.
The NGO Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) said in its Monitoring the Right to Life—2024 report that 10,457 migrants died en route to Spain via the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea this year. Victims included 1,538 children and adolescents and 421 women. Victims hailed from 28 mostly African nations, with some coming from as far afield as Iraq and Pakistan.
"These figures are evidence of a profound failure of rescue and protection systems," the group's founder, Helena Maleno, said in a statement. "More than 10,400 people dead or missing in a single year is an unacceptable tragedy."
Walking Borders said its report "documents the deadliest period on record, with devastating figures averaging 30 deaths a day," up from an average of 18 deaths per day in 2023.
Estás cifras son el horror 👇🏾
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— Helena Maleno Garzón (@helenamaleno.bsky.social) December 26, 2024 at 12:06 AM
According to the report:
The Atlantic route, with 9,757 deaths, remains the deadliest in the world. Tragedies have increased, especially on the Mauritanian route, consolidating this country as the main departure point to the Canary Islands. The Algerian route, in the Mediterranean, is the second deadliest according to our records, with 517 victims. The Strait of Gibraltar has taken up to 110 lives, and another 73 have been lost on the Alboran route. In addition, 131 vessels were lost, with all persons on board.
Spain's Interior Ministry said earlier this month that, as of December 15, 57,738 migrants successfully reached the country this year by sea, an all-time high.
Walking Borders denounced what it called "the main causes of this increase in shipwrecks and victims," including "the omission of the duty to rescue, the prioritization of migration control over the right to life, the externalization of borders in countries without adequate resources, the inaction and arbitrariness in rescues, [and] the criminalization of social organizations and families."
The group also noted "the situations of extreme vulnerability" that push migrants "to throw themselves into the sea in very precarious conditions."
These include "violence, discrimination, racism, deportations, and sexual violence," as well as "being forced to survive in extreme conditions" prior to departure.
"The number of victims continues to grow and the act of documenting deaths or preserving the victims' memory carries the threat of persecution and stigmatization," the publication states, adding that the dead migrants' voices "can be heard in this report, crying out at their disappearance and death and questioning their fate. They call for justice and an end to impunity."
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'A Disgrace': Italy Issues New Detention Order for Ship Saving Lives in Mediterranean
"This is unacceptable for a country under the rule of law," said a representative for Doctors Without Borders.
Sep 26, 2024
International aid group Doctors Without Borders said Wednesday that it plans to appeal the latest detention orders placed by Italian authorities on its search and rescue vessel, Geo Barents, arguing the directives were aimed at preventing it from saving the lives of refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
"This is unacceptable for a country under the rule of law," said Juan Matias Gil, a representative for the organization, which is also known by the French name Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
The latest orders against the group and its ship were issued on Monday, days after MSF helped 206 refugees disembark in Genoa, Italy on September 19.
After that rescue, the group received a distress alert from a plane that monitors the passage of asylum-seekers across the Mediterranean, where thousands of people have drowned in the past decade while attempting to reach Europe after fleeing violent conflicts, political unrest, and poverty.
The Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Center gave the Geo Barents crew approval to proceed to the overcrowded wooden boat detected by the plane, which was holding around 110 people from Syria, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Egypt.
But as MSF was about to complete the rescue, with just 20 people left in the boat, a Libyan Coast Guard patrol boat that had been donated by Italy arrived at the scene.
"They arrived, threatened to shoot, and carried out unsafe and intimidating maneuvers around the people in distress and the MSF rescue team," said Fulvia Conte, search and rescue team leader for MSF.
The group said the order, which requires the Geo Barents to be detained at a port for 60 days, is based on "twisted logic" and MSF's "alleged failure to comply with instructions from unreliable and often dangerous Libyan coast guards," said Judith Sunderland, associate director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, who was aboard the Geo Barents as it completed the rescue.
"It is a disgrace that the Italian authorities still consider the Libyan Coast Guard to be a reliable actor and source of information."
"People fleeing Libya often tell us about violent interceptions at sea carried out by the E.U.-backed Libyan Coast Guard," said Gil. "It has been documented by the United Nations and independent investigative journalists that the Libyan Coast Guard is complicit in serious human rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity, and collusion with smugglers and traffickers. It is a disgrace that the Italian authorities still consider the Libyan Coast Guard to be a reliable actor and source of information."
Sunderland noted that earlier this month, a judge lifted a previous 60-day detention order against the ship, with Italian authorities claiming MSF had caused "a dangerous situation by rescuing dozens of people from the water at night."
"The judge concluded the rescue had been 'urgent and unavoidable' and the detention jeopardized the organization's humanitarian objectives," wrote Sunderland.
Even though MSF had approval to complete the rescue on September 19, the first detention order was issued under the Piantedosi Decree, a law introduced in 2023 which requires non-governmental rescue ships to sail to the assigned port after a rescue, without picking up people from other boats in distress.
The second order was issued Monday following an in-depth inspection of Geo Barents by the Port State Control, which said it found eight technical deficiencies on the vessel.
Conte said such inspections "are another layer of administrative and technical instrumentalization of laws and regulations that the authorities have been using for the past seven years to obstruct the work of humanitarian search and rescue vessels in the Mediterranean."
"This one seems to have the intention to ensure we don't operate anytime soon," she said. "We are moving to quickly address these deficiencies and to go back to prevent deaths at sea."
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of HRW, said the latest orders suggest the Italian government is doing everything in its power "to stop NGO rescue ships from operating in the Mediterranean because rescuing migrants gets in the way of Italy's (and the E.U.'s) preferred approach of using the risk of drowning as a deterrent to migration."
MSF has helped rescue more than 91,000 people in search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, including 12,540 people who have been saved by the Geo Barents crew since 2021.
U.N. special rapporteur on human rights defenders Mary Lawlor said in 2023 that the punishment and criminalization of people working to save refugees from drowning was "a darkening stain on Italy and the E.U.'s commitment to human rights," after the Italian authorities brought criminal charges for "aiding and abetting unauthorized immigration" against nearly two dozen rescue crew members and rights advocates.
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When the Wealthy Perish at Sea We Mourn, But When the Poorest Perish We Yawn
3,000 deaths of migrants made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.
Sep 01, 2024
Over
3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict, the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.
Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.
On Monday, August 19, amid a fearsome sudden storm, a boat deemed “unsinkable” sank off the coast of Sicily’s Palermo. Seven of the 22 people on board perished.
What made this sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht that sported the world’s tallest aluminum mast. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”
That chief exec, the yacht’s owner Mike Lynch, had envisioned this voyage as a celebration over a decade in the making. Just weeks earlier, after years of legal battling, a federal jury in Northern California had acquitted Lynch and one of his VPs on charges they had artificially inflated the value of Lynch’s software company. That inflating, prosecutors charged, had sealed the firm’s 2011 sale to Hewlett-Packard for over $11 billion, a deal that netted Lynch personally about $800 million.
But within a year after the sale the value of Lynch’s company had tanked by some $8.8 billion, and H-P was referring allegations of accounting improprieties against Lynch to the British Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The referrals would eventually produce a civil-suit victory for H-P and a 2019 criminal conviction of a key exec at Lynch’s firm.
The 59-year-old Lynch and his finance VP Keith Chamberlain would have much better luck in their own criminal trial on similar charges. Unfortunately for them, they’ll never get to enjoy their acquittal. Lynch drowned in the sinking of his yacht, as did Lynch’s top trial lawyer and the chair of financial giant Morgan Stanley’s international arm, a star witness for Lynch’s defense.
What made this Lynch yacht sinking particularly irresistible for the world’s media? On the same day as the sinking, reports surfaced that Lynch’s acquitted co-defendant Chamberlain had just died after a car ran him over while he was jogging. A sheer coincidence? And how could the captain of Lynch’s superyacht and all but one of his crew escape the boat’s sinking alive while Lynch and six other passengers perished? Such juicy meat for endless conspiracy speculation!
But we need not resort to conspiratorial theorizing to understand why Lynch’s $25-million yacht sank so quickly that stormy night. That blame belongs in no small part to climate change, not some cabal of his billionaire corporate rivals.
By this past June, points out a new Financial Times analysis, water temperatures in the Mediterranean had been rising for 15 straight months. Higher water temperatures invite ever more extreme weather events. One such event — a tornado-like waterspout with “ferocious winds” howling at nearly 70 miles per hour — hit right near where Lynch had last anchored his superyacht.
Only 16 minutes passed between the moment those harsh winds first hit the yacht and the moment the yacht sank. That “rapid sinking of such a large, modern and well-equipped yacht,” adds the Financial Times, “has raised concerns over marine safety as extreme weather events occur with more frequency and intensity.”
In other words, the superyachts that typically spend summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean better beware.
But the mega-rich who own these yachts have, in one sense, no one to blame but themselves. Our globe remains in overall climate-crisis denial in no small part because our wealthiest have so much to lose if our world gets serious about ending the profligate corporate practices now driving our planet’s climate collapse.
The ranks of these richest include, of course, the fossil-fuel industry’s top execs and investors. But all our super rich, not just the kings of Big Oil, have a vested personal interest in “calming” climate anxiety. Coming to grips with the chaos fossil fuels have already created — and speeding a worker-sensitive transition to a carbon-free future — will take enormous financial resources. The world will only be able to raise those resources if the rich and their corporations start paying their fair tax share.
A tax of between a mere 1.7 and 3.5 percent on the wealth of the world’s richest 0.5 percent, suggests the UK-based Tax Justice Network, could annually raise $2.1 trillion. Most of the world’s richest nations, notes the Tax Justice Network’s Alison Schultz, are shying away from that suggestion.
Notes Schultz: “This needs to change now — the climate can’t wait, and nor can the people of the world.”
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