Brussels – Carola Rackete, the German captain of a migrant rescue ship who illegally entered Italian waters, accused the European Union (EU) of shirking its duty to rescue migrants from the Mediterranean Sea in an address to EU lawmakers on Thursday.
Instead the bloc had delegated “responsibility for rescues to a country at war, Libya,” she said in the European Parliament in Brussels, and called for EU-level shared responsibility for migrants rescued at sea.
Libya is not a safe place to return intercepted migrants to, Rackete said at the hearing commemorating the sixth anniversary of the Lampedusa shipwreck, in which more than 300 people drowned off the Italian island’s coast.
The EU suspended patrols by its own naval vessels in March amid a fierce spat over how to distribute migrants rescued at sea throughout the bloc, but still supports and trains the Libyan coastguard.
UN agencies have repeatedly highlighted the hellish conditions migrants who have landed in Libya whilst trying to reach Europe face in the country’s overcrowded detention centres.
Many rescue boats have been also been left stranded since last summer, with European ports refusing entry until member states could strike agreements to take in the rescued migrants on board.
The 31-year-old Rackete was the captain of one such boat, and came to public attention after taking 40 migrants to the island of Lampedusa on June 29, ignoring orders not to enter Italian territorial waters.
She remains a suspect in Italian criminal investigations, according to the German NGO Sea-Watch for which she captained the rescue ship.
The affair has made her a public – and polarizing – figure, amid the wider and long-running controversy over the EU’s response to the influx of migrants from North Africa.
Rackete’s speech came ahead of a meeting of EU interior ministers next week in Luxembourg, where a proposal for a temporary mechanism for disembarkation and distribution of migrants in the EU is expected on the agenda.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said the plan was a “good start” to ensuring certainty around disembarkation, urging EU member states to open their ports and take their faire share of disembarked people.
Furthermore, “EU ministers should affirm clearly that rescue vessels should not be bound to obey instructions to disembark in Libya,” the two human rights organisations said in a joint statement on Thursday. (dpa/NAN)