Italian authorities have authorized the German NGO ship ‘Louise Michel’ to disembark 33 migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean at a port in Lampedusa, although there are still more than 500 people awaiting similar permission on two other vessels.
The ‘Louise Michel’ docked in Lampedusa on Thursday night, following a «last minute» permit that came in the face of worsening weather conditions in the area. «We hope that (the migrants) will have a better reception among civil society than the violent border regime in Europe,» the organization said on social networks.
The NGO also collaborated in several rescues with the ‘Humanity 1’, where another 261 are now awaiting permission to reach a safe port. They are joined by another 248 migrants who are on the ‘Geo Barents’, the ship managed by the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
A 14-year-old boy was evacuated this Friday from the ‘Geo Barents’ due to abdominal pain that required urgent treatment, adding to other one-off evacuations, including that of a woman who gave birth on board and was able to leave the ship with her newborn and three other children – all under the age of eleven.
MSF has denounced that Malta’s first response was to authorize only the entry of the mother and the baby, without giving the other three children the option, which for the NGO is an attack on fundamental rights. Finally, all the members of the family were able to reach Lampedusa and, later, Sicily.
The coordinator of MSF’s search and rescue operations, Juan Matias Gil, regretted that «the same situation is repeated over and over again», as the absence of a disembarkation mechanism causes at best delays in the transfer of the migrants to land.
«We are not begging, we are simply asking Malta and Italy to fulfill their legal obligations. It is not acceptable to wait days, a week or more. Let’s stop playing with human lives,» Gil has demanded. The ‘Geo Barents’ is already close to Italy awaiting permission.
Italy’s new government, headed by the far-right Giorgia Meloni, has promised to be stricter with these permits, which has already resulted recently in a crossing of another ship, the ‘Ocean Viking’, to France. At least 1,362 people have died this year in the central Mediterranean area alone, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
