Each year, thousands of people embark on a perilous journey to reach safety in Europe, only to find abuse and mistreatment instead. Frequent shipwrecks, arbitrary detentions, torture, and sexual violence make the central Mediterranean the most dangerous—and most deadly—migration route in the world. It’s becoming even more treacherous under European Union (EU) policies that shun migrants and criminalize organizations responding to the resulting humanitarian crises, including Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
Our teams throughout the region witness the impact these policies have on our patients’ health, wellbeing, and dignity. Here are some of the ways EU migration policies put displaced people at risk—and how MSF is responding.
Obstructing search and rescue
The central Mediterranean migration route claims thousands of lives each year—and there’s no telling how many deaths go unrecorded when boats sink without a trace before anybody can call for help.
EU states have a legal obligation to help those in distress at their borders. Instead, they are blocking humanitarian search and rescue operations by creating unnecessary delays and detaining rescue ships, including MSF’s Geo Barents—resulting in periods as long as six months with almost no rescue capacity in the region at all.
While these policies ostensibly target humanitarian organizations, people seeking safety have paid the real price. MSF teams provide critical medical care aboard our ships, including treating fuel burns, assisting births, and coordinating transport of patients by helicopter or boat in the most urgent cases. Since 2015, our teams have conducted 784 search and rescue operations, reaching more than 88,000 people in need of aid.
MSF has launched several appeals in European courts to challenge this obstruction of our search and rescue work.
