The Ocean Viking, an SOS Méditerranée ambulance ship, which rescued twenty-nine migrants off the coast of Libya on Tuesday, will have to disembark these survivors in Ravenna, Italy, a port “far away” from its current position involving “six days of additional navigation”, denounced Wednesday October 25, the NGO. “After spending eight hours at sea”, these survivors, who “come mainly from Syria and Sudan”, two countries at war, are “exhausted”, added SOS Méditerranée, specifying that they are now taken care of on board by its teams and those of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Following a distress call from Alarm Phone – a number used by migrants encountering difficulties during their crossing of the Mediterranean – the Ocean Viking rescued on Tuesday October 24 afternoon twenty-nine people who were on “a fiberglass boat unfit for navigation in international waters off the coast of Libya,” the Marseille-based NGO reported in a press release. The maritime rescue coordination center in Italy asked the NGO boat to head towards the remote port of Ravenna, located 1,613 kilometers away, to be able to disembark the survivors. This destination, six days away from navigation, will deprive the Ocean Viking “of any possibility of searching for and rescuing women, men and children in distress in the central Mediterranean” for a long period of time, denounced the NGO.
Italy recently adopted a decree which partly hampers the activities of NGO ships, with them now being forced to transport rescued people to a port – often very distant – from the first operation, de facto preventing them from chain of rescues. SOS Méditerranée has rescued nearly 39,000 people in the Mediterranean since 2016, mainly in the central Mediterranean, the most dangerous migration route in the world. Since January, 2,166 migrants have disappeared on this route, according to the International Organization for Migration, a figure far higher than the 1,417 who disappeared in 2022.