Hope arrived on the radio, late in the afternoon with August sunshine blasting the deck.
After tortuous negotiations with authorities from four countries, Italy had finally granted us a port of safety. We were allowed to disembark the people we had rescued, in accordance with international law.
We had 114 passengers on board our ship, the Sea Eye 4, where I was volunteering as part of the crew. Overall, we had rescued three boats in distress. Some of the rescued had drifted without food, fuel, or water for days. One man had been unconscious for over 24 hours and would have been unlikely to survive much longer without aid.
But the rescue operation was not where the troubles ended. On reaching port in Salerno, we found our ship detained for 20 days and its operator, the NGO Sea Eye, fined €3,000.
We were one of three ships detained during that week in August 2023. This represented a total loss of 60 operating days during high summer, in a year where at least 2,000 people had already died while trying to cross the Mediterranean.
We were detained under the 2023 Piantedosi Decree, an Italian law which mandates immediate return to port after just one rescue. The law forces crews to make impossible choices. Should you ignore incoming distress calls and risk lives in the present, or risk detention and the ability to save lives in the future?
The decree is not an isolated piece of legislation – in Italy or the EU. It is just one of dozens of policies and laws that have been created to limit the movement of people across borders, and to limit other people’s capacity to help them. For over a decade, European states have withdrawn, denied, or evaded their responsibility to carry out rescues or provide safe ports.
Criminalisation: a refined tactic
It didn’t start off this way. In 2013, horrific twin shipwrecks near Lampedusa led to a serious response from the Italian government – a year-long rescue operation called Mare Nostrum, which saved thousands of lives.
But as the claims grew that Europe was experiencing a ‘migration crisis’, and with wider European support significantly lacking, the mood in Italy changed. Mare Nostrum was cancelled, and in 2017 a ‘code of conduct’ was introduced that restricted the actions of civil rescue ships.
This “Minniti Code” was brought in by centrists seeking to blunt a right-wing surge by proving they were sufficiently tough on irregular migration. It had little effect. Instead, the code handed tools to the far-right (such as the mainstreaming of an anti-migrant narrative and demonisation of rescue operations) that they would build on in later years to make additional gains.
At the end of last decade, rescue crews were being surveilled, wiretapped, and threatened with jail in a vicious offensive led by the Italian right. The sweeping crackdowns were an undeniable effort to criminalise humanitarian action and the movement of people across borders.
This campaign was eventually seen by policymakers as counterproductive. It had caused a huge public backlash, and taking NGOs and individuals to court with little evidence proved costly and time consuming. Undeterred, however, the Italian state switched to bureaucratic harassment.
Using a combination of fines, blockades, the assignment of distant ports of safety and weaponised inspections, they continued to significantly limit the ability of rescue crews to save lives at sea. They just kept a lower profile this time, lessening the potential for public outcry.
Block the rescuers, enable the militias
While Italy harassed rescue workers, it was also busy – together with the EU – handing over responsibility for rescue to violent criminals. The so-called Libyan Coast Guard (LCG) has received boats, equipment, funding, and support to establish a wider search and rescue area. It is routinely given the coordinates of boats in distress by Frontex, the EU border agency.
The LCG attacks, abuses, and violates the rights of people in distress at sea. It also returns them to detention camps in Libya where extortion, torture and exploitation are rife.
When the Libyan coast guard first spotted the rescue boat, they threatened to shoot at the rescuers
On their first mission back at sea after Sea Eye 4’s detainment, the crew arrived at a scene where the LCG was dangerously manoeuvring around a boat in distress, causing people to fall into the water. And when the LCG first spotted the rescue boat, they threatened to shoot at the rescuers.
Sea Eye 4 ultimately did respond to the people in distress, but was unable to prevent four people drowning. When they returned, Italy once again detained the ship and fined its crew for failing to “cooperate” with Libyan forces.
Over a year later, I returned to the central Mediterranean aboard the Humanity 1, a rescue ship run by the organisation SOS Humanity. The day before we sailed, Tunisia’s president Kais Saied was re-elected. He has joined Libya as a staunch ally in Europe’s fight against people migrating. Tunisia, Libya and Morocco have carried out countless “desert dumps”, in which thousands of mostly Black migrants are transported to and abandoned en masse in the Sahara.
Tunisia’s coast guard, which also has a grim record of rights abuses, is becoming more active too. Our most recent mission took place near the recently expanded Tunisian zone of rescue responsibility in the Mediterranean. The expansion of the zone has left rescue crews in that area at even further risk of detainment if they don’t return rescued people to Tunisia.
Whilst we were at sea, Giorgia Meloni launched a new attempt to forcibly transfer people disembarked in Italy to camps in Albania to await deportation. This proved a costly failure when the first twelve detainees immediately returned to Italy after a court judgment. But it provides just one more indication of a very worrying direction of travel for Italy and the EU.
All these efforts to hinder civilian rescue are, of course, partially about limiting the number of people arriving by sea to Europe. But that’s not the whole picture.
All together, the civil fleet only carries out a small proportion of overall rescues in the Med. Its ships brought in just 8% of those arriving in Italy in 2023. The Italian coast guard is still rescuing the rest of those delivered to the country’s shores – even though their area of operations has now shrunk to an area relatively close to the shoreline.
So why go to such great effort to stymie and discredit civil sea rescue? Something else is going on here.
Making movement illegal
Europe speaks loudly about its commitment to human rights and humanitarian values. For years, rescue organisations have pointed to the shallowness of these commitments in the face of thousands dying off European shores.
Europe and its member states have responded by delegitimising rescue workers’ motives and their voices, impugning them as not genuine humanitarians. They accuse the civil fleet of unprofessionalism, of being too political, and of cooperating with ‘smugglers’. When they’re feeling generous, they say rescuers are well-intentioned but their presence at sea encourages people to risk dangerous crossings.
None of this has ever been proven. Every single smuggling case brought against rescue crews has collapsed. And comprehensive studies have debunked the link between the presence of rescue assets and people’s decisions to cross the Mediterranean.
As the EU rewrites its anti-smuggling policy, there is a real risk that the criminalisation of people migrating, and people who assist them, will deepen
But it does not matter anymore. Humanitarian actors in the Mediterranean have already become associated with criminality, and that idea is now embedded in European political discourse. Justified by the claim of ‘countering smuggling’, the EU is seeking to undermine every aspect of irregular movement by criminalising more and more parts of it outright and framing the rest as criminal in essence.
It's not just rescue workers. From 2015 to 2018 alone, Italy arrested 1,300 people they accused of driving small boats. An Iranian women’s rights activist fleeing persecution and four Libyan refugee footballers who survived a shipwreck were among those caught up in this campaign. Greece has engaged in similar tactics, with thousands of trials taking place and ‘boat drivers’ handed sentences of over 100 years in prison.
Many of the trials are deeply legally unsound, and some have lasted as little as 30 minutes. But their effect on the framing of humanitarian action has a much longer shelf life. Europe and Italy are seeking to tar everyone associated with irregular migration as criminals in the court of public opinion – those on the move and those extending a hand.
‘Counter-smuggling’ doesn’t work
The EU is currently rewriting its anti-smuggling policy, and there is a real risk that the criminalisation of people migrating, and people who act in solidarity with them, will deepen. As with the war on drugs and prohibition-type policies in general, the strategy won’t stop people from doing either of these things. But it will likely get more people killed.
Neither smuggling groups nor rescue actors create the demand for their services. Poverty, violence, and the absence of safe routes do. As borders are enforced more harshly, people attempting to move are forced to rely on more dangerous routes, and sometimes more dangerous actors. More people end up in distress, and more people need to be rescued.
It’s a loop, but not one created by smuggling profits. It exists because governments refuse to see reason.
Another way to understand this is to see ‘countering smuggling’ not so much as a policy approach, but as a political convergence. It’s where the demands of the right for evermore violent border control and the demands of liberals for lip-service to humanitarian principles meet.
This convergence reframes border enforcement as ‘protecting’ migrants from the brutality of gangs. It conjures up a simple enemy, obscuring the agency of people migrating and the reality of their journeys. And it treats movement as a crime, one which necessitates a multinational police and military response.
In turn, this helps the lucrative border and surveillance industry to hijack policy, selling ever more expensive ‘solutions’ to monitoring and controlling movement. Those resources should be going into helping people, not harming them. The first imperative should not be to “smash gangs” but to save lives.
We need the restoration of coordinated search and rescue by the competent authorities. We need safe routes. And we need funding and support both for people arriving and the wider communities they settle in.
At the moment, such vision and compassion seem a long way from the reality of European politics. But the emergency at Europe’s shores is not going anywhere. Not until we reach an approach founded on hope and courage rather than fear and division.
Explore the rest of the series
This series looks at how the UK, EU and bordering countries are increasingly treating migration as a criminal offence, and targeting migrants and solidarity actors in the name of ‘anti-smuggling’ and ‘border control’.
- Caught in the net: How migration became a criminal offenceMelissa Pawson, Vicky Taylor
- Children prosecuted as adult ‘smugglers’ in UK, Italy, GreeceFrey Lindsay
- Greece accused me of espionage. I was helping people they'd violatedNatalie Gruber
- Starmer’s counter-terror plan for migration woefully misses the markRuben Andersson
- Interview: I sought safety in the UK. I was sent to prison insteadSamyar Bani, Melissa Pawson
- EU migration strategy: treat migrants like the mafiaLorenzo D’Agostino
- Migrants’ rights workers forced out of Tunisia in latest crackdownChiara Loschi
- Smuggling is back out in the open in Niger. What’s the impact on migrants?Ekaterina Golovko
