Italian authorities have authorized the ship ‘Geo Barents’, managed by the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), to dock at the port of Salerno so that the 248 migrants and refugees currently on board can disembark, the organization itself has reported.
MSF, which has warned of poor weather conditions in the area, expects to take about 24 hours to reach Salerno. «Having a safe place to disembark is good news for all the survivors after the traumatic experiences they have had to face,» it said on Twitter.
So far, only one-off evacuations had been authorized from the ‘Geo Barents’, including that of a 14-year-old boy with abdominal pain and a mother and her four children — all under the age of 11 — after the woman gave birth on board.
The coordinator of MSF’s search and rescue operations, Juan Matías Gil, has lamented 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 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.
Italy’s new government, led 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).
