Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of Non-Assistance at Sea

The Iuventa has rescued over ten thousand people from the Mediterranean since it began operating in 2016. When the vessel was impounded by Italian authorities under suspicion of collusion with people smugglers, we used video evidence and meteorological data to refute the allegations.

On 6 November 2017, a rescue vessel operated by the NGO Sea Watch (SW) and a patrol vessel of the Libyan coastguard were both en route towards a migrants’ boat, in distress in international waters. The boat, a few hours out of Tripoli, was carrying between 130 and 150 passengers. A confrontational rescue operation ensued, and while SW was able to rescue fifty-nine passengers, bringing them to safety in Italy, at least twenty died before or during the incident, while forty-seven passengers were ultimately ‘pulled back’ to Libya, where several faced grave human rights violations – including being detained, beaten, and sold to another captor who tortured them to extract ransom from their families. -FA

In March 2011, 72 passengers left the Libyan coast heading in the direction of Italy on board a small rubber boat at the time of NATO’s military intervention in Libya. Despite several distress signals relaying their location, as well as repeated interactions with at least one military helicopter and a military ship, they were left to drift for 14 days. As a result of the inaction of all state actors involved, only nine of the passengers survived. By combining their testimonies with wind and sea-current data as well as satellite imagery, Forensic Oceanography reconstructed the liquid traces of this event, producing a report that served as the basis of several legal complaints. -FA