Drowning rate of prima facie refugees in the Mediterranean as a result of EU policies increased again this year so far.
I am sick and tired of normal media coverage using e.g. AP Style Guide terminology being too polite and too simplistic to explain the necessary factual and legal context to the general public. It’s not really that hard! And how do you really know that the public wouldn’t get it until you try?!
“The analysis, produced by the Missing Migrants Project at the IOM’s Global Migration Data Analysis Centre (GMDAC), shows an increase in deaths coupled with insufficient search and rescue operations* in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic Route to the Canary Islands, and at a time when interceptions off the North African coast are also on the rise.
So far in 2021, most of the men, women and children who died trying to reach Europe were attempting to cross the Mediterranean, where 896 deaths have been documented by IOM.
At least 741 people died on the Central Mediterranean route, while 149 people lost their lives crossing the Western Mediterranean and six died on the Eastern Mediterranean route from Turkey to Greece.
In the same period, some 250 people drowned attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands on the West Africa/Atlantic route. However, that count may well be low. Hundreds of cases of invisible shipwrecks have been reported by NGOs in direct contact with those on board or with their families. Such cases, which are extremely difficult to verify, indicate that deaths on maritime routes to Europe are far higher than available data show.”
* “insufficient search and rescue operations” is a typical UN agency euphemism for European governments’ de facto policy of deliberately blocking and delaying the civil rescue fleet from rescuing people in distress at sea according to the law, because they want Brown people likely to be refugees to keep on drowning ‘par an example pour les autres’, to deter the rest.
Their “crime” of attempting irregular entrance is really insubordinately claiming their human rights not in line with the deliberately minimized, hopelessly delayed, performatively tokenized regular resettlement procedures.
The irregular market and irregular routes for people in serious need to migrate would not exist if there were reasonably sized, reasonably fast, reasonably accessible legal routes. And if the irregular market for international migration were minimized by providing better regular alternatives to people with urgent and severe needs to migrate, then human traffickers would have minimal opportunities to trick people looking for a facilitator of irregular entrance aka. a ‘smuggler’, but traffickers are indispensable to EU government’s legitimative narrative for the whole abusive system they set up and maintain, so they won’t do the most obvious relevant practical things to actually reduce human trafficking — allow realistic size and speed legal routes, proactively go to rescue people, as in TPD2001 Art.2d.
European politicians want “human rights” to be only a token they control and use in self-legitimating rhetoric, they don’t want to actually be responsible for such rights.
Why don’t refugees simply approach a frontier and declare their claims? Because of EC2001 51C transport carriers regulations which make private transport carriers liable financially for the return costs and penalties if they allow people likely to be in need of international protection to approach a frontier or into a transit zone in order to declare their asylum claims. For prima facie refugees to approach a frontier or to enter a transit zone is entirely legal, but they’re blocked from doing that in practice, not least by the violent pushbacks commissioned, funded, instigated and coordinated by EU governments and their intergovernmental agencies, mainly Frontex.
Compare and contrast — the official Statement yesterday by the Delegation of the European Union to Libya —
The Statement is so full of lies I can’t even believe it’s sincere.
The “recent developments” aren’t really recent at all — they’re just breaking into mainstream public discussion more than EU leaders would like now.
The atrocious conditions in Libyan migrant detention centres are part of the EU’s collective punitive deterrent regime policy, developed for the last 7 years. They lament them and continue funding them unchanged at the same time, so it’s like crocodiles’ tears.
Also, Frontex should be abolished as it is evidently un-reformable —
It’s totally unrealistic to see mass drowning events as tragic accidents or unexpected or unintended — they’re consistent and predictable results of the EU’s actual policies for the last 7 years, and after 7 years of the same results it’s impossible to not infer intentionality.
If an ordinary individual criminal claimed in a court that their continuous actions over 7 years with clearly criminal results were unintentional, unless they had an insanity excuse, it certainly would not pass.
Intentionally and systematically causing mass drownings as part of a collective punitive deterrent regime (systematically violating article 31 of the Refugee Convention 1951) and by commissioning and coordinating (mostly extraterritorial) refoulement (mostly by third-party agents) (contra article 33 of the Convention), which are the EU’s current de facto policies against people likely to be in need of international protection should be considered a crime against humanity in terms of ICC Statute Article 7 (1) (k) — for setting up and maintaining a system calculated to bring about mass civilian deaths by drowning and deliberately obstructing rescuers, in order to use their deaths as a deterrent to others.
It is inappropriate to be too polite about this or when reporting new instances of it. It is clearly a deliberate systematic pattern of the most serious kinds of criminal behaviour by our governments, not just tragic isolated events, nor inevitable results of previous tragedies out of our control now.
Presuming that international maritime and human rights law is too complicated or the contexts or terminology too hard to explain to the public is part of how our governments continue to get away with deliberately imposing conditions calculated to bring about mass drownings of refugees. It is really possible and much easier than you think to explain it in simple enough terms.
