Volker Turk urges expansion of rescue operations after a ‘steep increase’ in number of people making risky attempts to cross the central Mediterranean to Europe.
“We are seeing a steep increase in the number of desperate people putting their lives at grave risk,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement on Thursday. “We cannot afford to dither, and to become embroiled in yet another debate about who is responsible.”
Turk also called for solidarity with Italy, which has traditionally received most arrivals, adding that the Italian coastguard had rescued some 2,000 people on the route since Friday. Italy’s right-wing government this week imposed a six-month state of emergency to deal with the situation.
“Human lives are at stake,” he said, while also urging Italy’s government to scrap a law passed this year that restricted civilian search-and rescue-operations.
The appeal came a day after the UN’s migration agency said more than 400 people had drowned in the Central Mediterranean during the first three months of the year, as growing numbers of people attempt to reach Europe via the Mediterranean.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Wednesday announced the reported number of people 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 during January, February and March 2023, compared with 742 in 2017 and 446 in 2015.
“The persisting humanitarian crisis in the central Mediterranean is intolerable,” said IOM head Antonio Vitorino, calling for more search-and-rescue operations by state authorities.
The European Union border agency Frontex said three times as many people sought to reach the EU across the Mediterranean in the first three months of 2023 compared with a year before.
Frontex reported 54,000 “irregular” crossings into the bloc via all routes in the first quarter of the year, up a fifth from 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, adding that nearly 28,000 people had arrived that way from the start of the year until the end of March, three times as many as in the same period in 2022.
“Organised crime groups took advantage of better weather and political volatility in some countries of departure to try to smuggle as many [people] as possible across the Central Mediterranean from Tunisia and Libya.”
The Italian government on Wednesday announced a state of emergency following a “sharp rise” in arrivals across the Mediterranean, a move that will allow it to send back refugees more quickly.
Rome has asked the EU to do more to stop sea arrivals, the latest example of how refugee crossings have returned to the top of the bloc’s political agenda as global mobility picked up last year from COVID pandemic lows.
Also Thursday, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said it was scaling up humanitarian assistance and protection services along the route — including psychological support, first aid, family reunification services and help with disembarkation in Italy.