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Alarm Phone | 12.06.2018

Alarm Phone 6 Week Report, 30 April – 10 June 2018

+++ 784 counted Deaths at Sea in 2018 +++ New Italian Government escalates Situation at Sea +++ Palermo Charter process toward Corridors of Solidarity +++ Remarkable Rise in Boat-Migration between Morocco and Spain +++ New ‘Mare Liberum’ Counter-Surveillance project in the Aegean +++ Developments in all three Mediterranean regions +++ Summaries of 58 Alarm Phone distress cases

Introduction

Since October 2014, when we launched the Alarm Phone project, we have worked on more than 2,000 emergency cases at sea – 2,054 to be precise. In the Aegean Sea, we dealt with 1,582 cases, in the Western Mediterranean with 279, and in the Central Mediterranean with 193. When we speak of distress cases, we speak of boats whose passengers find themselves in life-threatening situations. In some situations, we tried to support groups of five, in others groups of five hundred. Looking back, nobody in our project could have predicted such high number of distress situations, and nobody would have liked to see them go into the thousands. Over the past six weeks alone, we had 58 cases, most of which took place in the Western Mediterranean. That we are still called from all three regions of the Mediterranean and have to listen to people in acute distress is not a reason to celebrate. Some of them did not make it to Europe. They were pushed-back by European forces, intercepted by Europe’s allies, or they drowned in their attempt to find a better place for them to live. Even those who survived are marked by the often-harrowing experiences they made, at sea and before, during their often lengthy journeys of escape. When we launched the hotline, we made clear that we did not see it as a solution to migrant death at sea – the only real solution would be a radical change in the ways in which Europe governs its borders. Now, three-and-a-half years later, we still raise the same demands as the dying the Mediterranean continues.

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