UN rights chief seeks help as Mediterranean refugee deaths surge
Volker Turk is calling for rescue operations to be expanded after a ‘sharp increase’ in the number of people making risky attempts to cross the Central Mediterranean to Europe.
The UN human rights chief has called for search and rescue operations to be expanded following an increase in the number of refugees and asylum seekers making risky attempts to cross the central Mediterranean into Europe.
“We are seeing a sharp increase in the number of desperate people who are seriously putting their lives on the line,” Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement Thursday. “We cannot afford to falter and get caught up in yet another debate over who is responsible.”
Turk also called for solidarity with Italy, which has traditionally received the most arrivals, adding that the Italian coastguard has rescued some 2,000 people on the route since Friday. Italy’s right-wing government this week declared a six-month state of emergency to deal with the situation.
“People’s lives are at stake,” he said, while also urging the Italian government to scrap a law passed this year that restricted civilian search and rescue operations.
The call came a day after the UN migration office said more than 400 people had drowned in the central Mediterranean in the first three months of the year, as more and more people tried to reach Europe via the Mediterranean.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced this on Wednesday reported number of dead and missing along the Central Mediterranean reached the highest level of any first quarter since 2017 in the first three months of this year.
The IOM documented 441 refugee deaths along the route in January, February and March 2023, compared to 742 in 2017 and 446 in 2015.
“The ongoing humanitarian crisis in the central Mediterranean is unbearable,” said IOM chief Antonio Vitorino, calling for more search and rescue operations by state authorities.
The European Union’s border agency, Frontex, said three times as many people tried to reach the EU across the Mediterranean in the first three months of 2023 compared to a year earlier.
Frontex reported 54,000 “irregular” crossings to the bloc across all routes in the first quarter of the year, a fifth more than in 2022.
“The Central Mediterranean route accounts for more than half of all irregular border crossings into the EU,” Frontex said in a statement on Wednesday. times as much as in the same period in 2022.
Organized crime groups took advantage of the better weather and political instability in some departure countries to smuggle as many as possible [people] possibly across the Central Mediterranean from Tunisia and Libya.”
The Italian government declared a state of emergency on Wednesday after a “sharp rise” in arrivals across the Mediterranean, a measure that will allow it to return refugees more quickly.
Rome has asked the EU to do more to stop sea arrivals, the latest example of how refugee crossings are back at the top of the bloc’s political agenda as global mobility picked up again last year from the low of the COVID pandemic.
Also Thursday, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it is scaling up humanitarian and protection services along the route — including psychological support, first aid, family reunification services and assistance with disembarkation in Italy.