Barroso to visit Lampedusa

As death toll from boat disaster rises, EU wrestles with legal and policy questions.

José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, is to visit the Italian island of Lampedusa, where at least 194 migrants have drowned in one of the worst disasters in the Mediterranean in years.

Eighty-three bodies were recovered yesterday (6 October), bringing the confirmed death toll from Thursday’s accident to 194. Around 150 others are still missing.

“The visit will take place in the spirit of European support and solidarity expressed by the Commission following last week’s tragic events,” the Commission said in a press release today. It added that the Commission is “fully committed to work on further measures and concrete actions that can be taken at European and national level to address the plight of the refugees”.

Barroso is scheduled to visit the tiny island, halfway between Malta and Tunisia, on Wednesday (9 October).

On Friday, Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta gave Italian citizenship to the drowned men, women and children. Meanwhile, the 155 survivors, almost all of them thought to be from Eritrea and including 40 unaccompanied minors, are now facing prosecution for illegal entry – a crime under Italian law – and repatriation.

The survivors have been moved to a reception centre on Lampedusa that, according to the UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR), is already overcrowded with around 1,000 people from other recent landings.

The Commission defended itself against claims that it should have acted against an Italian law that allows ship crews who rescue migrants in distress to be prosecuted for aiding illegal entry.

“It is not for the Commission to comment or to have opinions on national laws covering national competences,” a spokesman for Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, said on Friday. “There is an obligation to rescue under international maritime law, but in our understanding this is not an EU competence.”

Survivors told UNHCR that three fishing vessels had ignored their distress calls, prompting them to set fire to blankets and clothing in a bid to attract attention to their boat, whose engine had failed. The survivors were eventually picked up by Italy’s coastguard.

In March 2011, dozens of migrants seeking to reach Lampedusa drowned, allegedly after several European naval vessels patrolling the area ignored their distress calls.

EU home affairs ministers are supposed to discuss the plight of refugees in Luxembourg tomorrow. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is to brief them about the situation in Syria, where more than seven million people – one-third of the population – have been displaced by the violence.

Malmström has been calling repeatedly for member states to relieve the burden on the EU’s frontline states by admitting more refugees, but the EU has no means to compel member states to do so.

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