Ship’s Captains Call for Uniform Policies on Migrants at Sea
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Version 0 of 1. LONDON — As a growing number of migrants and refugees travel to Europe by land, air or, most tragically recently, by sea, southern countries of the European Union like Greece and Italy face the largest burdens, and Bulgaria, a newer member, has rebuilt walls to keep out illegal migrants. But there has also been a large burden put on the captains or masters of naval and merchant ships in the Mediterranean to aid wayward travelers as more of them make risky attempts to get over the geographical barriers and through the European Union’s legal hurdles. The sea captains are obligated by international customs and laws of the sea to help those in distress, but they have sometimes found difficulties unloading their unwelcome human cargo, once rescued, in countries like Italy that are already coping with large numbers of illegal migrants and unverified refugees. “No country really wants them, so everywhere you go, you’re bringing an issue to the shore that has to be resolved somehow,” said Leonard Doyle of the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration. “There have been cases of countries refusing to accept them, and sometimes the ship’s captain doesn’t know if he will or won’t be prosecuted.” Eight years ago, the European Union, in a report on illegal migration, acknowledged a “disunity within the E.U. over which obligations arise from E.U. fundamental rights, international human rights and refugee law, and how these obligations relate to the law of the sea.” There has been no clarity in the years since, and no unified European Union policy on immigration or screening for migrants and refugees. Prosecutions of sea captains who rescue migrants at sea for aiding illegal immigration are rare, said James Kraska, a professor of international law at the United States Naval War College in Newport, R.I. Naval ships are as much subject to international conventions on search and rescue as merchant ships, he said. And ship captains and owners can be caught between competing authorities. “It’s a clash between the international law of the sea and national laws governing immigration, and the European Union has no single law,” he said. The problem comes, he said, when state authorities refuse to take over and exercise their own obligations to those who have been rescued. In the case of Italy and Greece, Dr. Kraska said, “sometimes they feel overwhelmed,” and there are often political considerations in countries where political parties opposed to generous immigration policies are gaining ground. “You cannot ignore a distress signal,” said James Gosling, a maritime lawyer at Holman Fenwick Willan in London. “It’s a basic precept of law.” But captains “are under a real dilemma,” he said, “because any captain is under commercial pressure to get from A to B as soon as possible.” And, Mr. Gosling said, “my understanding is that the Italians are getting very fractious, and the way they’ve scaled down search and rescue is making life difficult for the people who rescue.” The duty to rescue those “at peril on the sea” stems from antiquity, out of a sense that mariners are a community “who owe a duty to one another in a particularly perilous domain,” Dr. Kraska said. Customary law is just as binding as treaty law, and there are a number of treaties and conventions that obligate ship captains and masters to come to the aid of those in need. International statutes include the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, in force since 1994; the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, in force since 1980; and the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, in force since 1985. But the surge of illegal migration and the threat of piracy mean that “the current attitude of many state parties — particularly heightened by the era of terrorism and increase in migration flows (Horn of Africa) — makes it difficult to enforce the obligations,” according to the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat, an advocacy group. What is required, the group said, is “a change in attitude by coastal states to reflect a more genuine balance between security interests and the need to assist master/captains who have gone out of their way to fulfill their obligation to assist and rescue persons — asylum seekers and irregular migrants, who are the most likely to expose themselves to such dangers — in distress at sea.” The International Organization for Migration suggested that “the lack of a uniform approach to human rights and refugee law and the law of the sea allows states to favor minimum compliance with maritime rules over the bona fide fulfillment of international protection obligations.” On Tuesday, the International Chamber of Shipping and the European Community Shipowners’ Associations said in a joint statement that the authorities must clamp down on criminal people-smugglers and the root causes of the migrant flows from Africa, the Middle East and Asia. “But the urgent and immediate priority is for E.U. member states to increase resources for search-and-rescue operations before thousands more people die,” said Patrick Verhoeven, the secretary general of the shipowners’ group. |