DEATH BY (FAILURE TO) RESCUE - new report about the 18th of April 2015

DEATH BY (FAILURE TO) RESCUE The following report, produced by Forensic Oceanography – a research team based within the Forensic Architecture agency at Goldsmiths (University of London) that specialises in the use of forensic techniques and cartography to reconstruct cases of deaths at sea – in collaboration with WatchTheMed and in the framework of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-supported “Precarious Trajectories” research project, seeks to understand the conditions that made these events possible. It relies on new findings generated through extensive interviews with state officials and migrants, newly accessed operational documents, statistical data and technical evidence such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel tracking data. This material has been analysed in collaboration with experts in the relevant fields of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), oceanography, EU policy, international law and migration studies. read more/continua

Foreword by Barbara Spinelli, Member of the European Parliament (European United Left/Nordic Green Left Parliamentary Group)2016 will be remembered as the year in which the European Union definitively broke the civilisation pact on which it was founded after the Second World War. For years, after the great Lampedusa shipwreck on 3 October 2013, the EU has tacitly allowed the deaths at sea of thousands of refugees fleeing towards the European coasts, having been unable to guarantee safe and legal access routes to the Union. This year, in 2016, The EU has taken a further step towards barbarity: not only has it closed its internal borders by dismantling the Schengen area, but it has consciously decided to send refugees back to the war zones from which they had previously fled, and from which they are still escaping. The agreement with Turkey signed on 20 March 2016, which enables the mass deportation of refugees who manage to reach Greece, cannot be interpreted in any other way. Thousands of these returnees are sent back by the Erdogan regime to the Syrian war zones from which they had initially escaped: a deportation that violates national, European and international laws. The dirty work is entrusted to its Turkish ally, but it is Europe itself that takes the responsibility for this collective refoulement, bringing about the deadly triangulation of forced returns. read more/continua...

DEATH BY RESCUE
THE LETHAL EFFECTS OF THE EU’S POLICIES OF NON-ASSISTANCEThe week commencing 12 April 2015 saw what is believed to be the largest loss of life at sea in the recent history of the Mediterranean. On 12 April, 400 people died when an overcrowded boat capsized due to its passengers’ excitement at the sight of platform supply vessels approaching to rescue them. Less than a week later, on 18 April, a similar incident took an even greater toll in human lives, leading the deadliest single shipwreck recorded by the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Mediterranean.   Over 800 people are believed to have died when a migrants’ vessel sank after a mis-manoeuvre led it to collide with a cargo ship that had approached to rescue its passengers. More than 1,200 lives were thus lost in a single week. As Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) commented at the time, these figures eerily resemble those of a war zone.  read more/continua...