University of Oxford | 19.04.2018
PART II
Guest post by Paolo Cuttitta, Researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His most recent articles focus on humanitarianism and human rights, as well as on search and rescue NGOs, at the Central Mediterranean EU border.
In the first part of this post, I, first, described the establishment of a humanitarianized space of the sea between Italy and Libya after the 2012 ECtHR judgment and the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck. Then, I showed how the EU, Italy and other European countries gradually moved away from humanitarian concerns: by enhancing cooperation with Libyan authorities, by terminating governmental SAR missions, as well as by focusing on border control operations and de facto restricting their operational areas. In this second installment, I show that SAR NGOs have been increasingly exposed to harassment from the Libyan authorities, as well as to restrictions from the Italian ones. I further address the three points that make the Open Arms case unique, namely Italy’s claims that: a) Libya can coordinate SAR operations autonomously; b) the Open Arms acted in breach of the code of conduct; c) the Open Arms should have brought the rescued to Malta. In doing so, I argue that Italy can be held legally accountable for push-backs carried out by the Libyan Coast Guard, that the code of conduct has little if any relevance, and that trying to involve Malta means increasing the death risk at sea.
