by Nick O’Connell
EU Political Analysis

30 October 2019

With 16,840 lives lost at sea since 2014 and 1,085 just this year, there is no time for petty political debates and partisan politics. Member States and the European Union must follow the lead of NGOs and support search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

And yet the Union fails to act upon its own shortcomings. One step forward and three back. This has been Europe’s record on migratory policies for the past years.

After the positive signals coming out of the September Malta MiniSummit, when some member states reached a tentative agreement on a mechanism for the redistribution of migrants, the newly-elected EU Parliament struck down a resolution that would have put humanity first and limited the numbers of deaths at sea.

Member states need to step up efforts now to rescue people drowning in the sea, and this resolution was a first step in that direction.

On Thursday, 24 October Parliament rejected the text of a resolution on search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, which would have required member states to keep their ports open to NGO ships rescuing migrants at sea. The resolution failed by two votes, including 36 that abstained.

Of those 36 abstained, fourteen are members of the Italian Five Star Movement. Italy’s Prime Minister and member of the Movement Giuseppe Conte recently announced that under his leadership the country would enter a “new humanism” and a fresh chapter for its highly polarized politics.  But still, this party once again proved to put party interests before humanity.

Party spokesperson Laura Ferrara said this was a “lost occasion to reform Europe’s migration policy.” Indeed it was. It was a lost occasion by the Five Star Movement to prove they are different from the country’s center-right coalition. And they failed to step up.

At Migrants of the Mediterranean, we are thinking of the human cost of this failed resolution.

#OceanViking has been blocked at sea for seven days now with 104 migrants aboard.

#AlanKurdi just saved 90 people while being shot at by the same Libyan Coast Guard funded by the Italian government.

#OpenArms saved 43 people 32 miles from Lampedusa, but Italy refuses to support rescue operations anywhere outside its 12-mile maritime border.

The country’s government must promote bold, humanitarian policies. They must signal a clear cut from the politics of division and hate of the previous far-right government. Acting like strongmen and promoting anti-migrant policies will not benefit the center-left coalition. It will only embolden Salvini’s far-right Lega party and his isolationist stands.

MotM remains nonetheless on the front line, calling out these political shortcomings, as we did in Foggia a few weeks ago, reporting the inhumane conditions of Gran Ghetto.

We know migrants are a resource to society, not its burden.

We know migrants are human beings with lives and stories, not just numbers.

Migrants of the Mediterranean is dedicated to giving a face and voice to those on the margins, to elevate the migration discourse squarely in human terms.