Sea Watch migrants to dock in Italy after 7 countries agree to take them in

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Sea Watch migrants to dock in Italy after 7 countries agree to take them in
People onboard the Sea Watch 3 hand a banner saying: ‘Thank you for the solidarity’. Photo: Federico Scoppa/AFP

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Wednesday that 47 rescued migrants aboard the Sea Watch NGO vessel could finally disembark after Italy and six other countries agreed to take them in.

“Luxembourg has joined the list of friendly countries that responded to our invitation [to take the migrants], now we are seven countries,” Conte told journalists.

“Disembarking will begin in the coming hours.”

The other countries that have agreed to take in the migrants and asylum seekers, who have been stuck on the Sea Watch 3 vessel for nearly two weeks, are France, Germany, Malta, Portugal and Romania.

Their fate has been at the centre of a standoff between Italy’s anti-immigration Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and the German NGO Sea Watch.

The aid group on Friday filed an urgent case at the European Human Rights Court against Italy for refusing to allow its ship to dock. Sea Watch took the step because of Rome’s hardline attitude against the mainly sub-Saharan migrants that its ship Sea Watch 3 pulled out of the Mediterranean on January 19th.

Sea Watch 3 is sailing under a Dutch flag and currently sheltering from bad weather off Sicily.

It picked up the migrants and asylum-seekers — including eight minors — off the coast of Libya as they made the treacherous Mediterranean crossing.


One of the minors rescued by the Sea Watch 3. Photo: Federico Scoppa/AFP

The Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday urged the Italian government to “take all necessary measures, as quickly as possible”, to provide migrants on board the Sea Watch 3 with medical care, water and food.

People in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, less than a mile from where the Sea Watch is stalled offshore, have offered assistance as the ship waits.

Mayor Francesco Italia boarded the vessel for a visit and warned that conditions were worsening, including for the children onboard. Meanwhile a group of hotel and B&B owners in Syracuse offered to take in all 47 migrants and help integrate them at their own cost, from sending them to Italian lessons to giving them jobs.

“A huge thank you. Please keep it up,” the ship’s captain, Kim Heaton-Heather, said in a video message.

Migrants rescued at sea have frequently been left in limbo since Italy’s anti-immigration government began turning them away last summer. Europe has been wrestling with divisions over how to handle the problem since the migration crisis of 2015 when more than one million people arrived on its shores, many of them fleeing conflict in the Middle East.

Salvini, who has warned that he was considering legal action against Sea Watch’s crew, said on Tuesday that the 47 migrants could disembark if they agreed to leave for Germany or the Netherlands.

The Netherlands rebuffed Italy’s call to take in the 47 migrants, arguing that Dutch-flagged ship had acted “on its own initiative”.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday called for the need for “humane solutions” for migrant rescue operations and urged that migrants be allowed to disembark at the nearest port, in this case “in Italy”. He said sharing of the care of migrants came after, and that France was committed to that principal.

In a similar case earlier this month, the EU struck a deal to share out between eight European countries nearly 50 migrants stranded aboard two ships, one of which was Sea Watch 3.

Some 113,482 migrants crossed the Mediterranean to reach Europe last year, according to the UN refugee agency, which said 2,262 people lost their lives or went missing making the perilous journey.

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Source:Thelocal.it