Frontex Footage Raises Questions over Sea-Watch Migrant Transfer

https://twitter.com/Raeubertochtah/status/2080209911787458587

Investigation into the Captain

Four days after the operation, the Sea-Watch 5 reached the southern Italian port of Brindisi carrying a total of 166 migrants. Its captain is under investigation on suspicion of facilitating illegal entry.

Sea-Watch denies having made any arrangement with smugglers. It says the published footage shows only a brief part of the operation. According to the organization, two people were unconscious and several others were severely weakened.

Sea-Watch says the crew neither communicated with the masked men nor arranged a transfer. The organization also maintains that its crews have previously been threatened, harassed and fired upon by Libyan forces and that, on 11 May, there was a risk the rescue vessel might be boarded.

The Frontex video alone can neither confirm nor disprove those claims. It does show, however, that the vessel from which the migrants were transferred remained seaworthy and that the operation proceeded without any visible chaos.

Years of Controversy over the Mediterranean Route

The latest case is not a new controversy but another episode in a system that has operated for years under the banner of maritime rescue: smugglers ferry migrants out to sea from Libya, private organizations take them aboard and bring them to the European Union.

Sea-Watch is among the best-known operators on this route. The organization became a political symbol in 2019, when Carola Rackete entered the port of Lampedusa aboard the Sea-Watch 3 despite an Italian ban. The ship was carrying migrants it had previously picked up off the Libyan coast.

Rackete was temporarily detained. In Germany, politicians, church representatives and major media outlets portrayed her as a heroine. Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister at the time, regarded her as the face of a movement prepared to defy state decisions on borders and immigration.

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The criminal proceedings against Rackete were later dropped, bringing the case against her to an end. Sea-Watch’s operating model nevertheless remained in place: its vessels patrol off the North African coast, take migrants on board and bring them to Europe. Libya is ruled out as a destination, and those rescued are not returned to their point of departure.

For smugglers, this system is a gift. They no longer need to transport the migrants who have paid them all the way to Italy or Malta. Boats, fuel and engines are required only for the first stage of the journey. A European organization then completes the rest, invoking international maritime law before demanding access to a European port.

No secret arrangement is required. The roles are understood, the routes are predictable and the ships can be tracked publicly. Smugglers know where the NGOs operate. The NGOs know which stretches of coastline the boats depart from. The result is a division of labor in which no one ultimately wishes to accept responsibility for the journey as a whole.

It is for this reason that critics speak of an “asylum mafia”. They mean a network of mutually reinforcing interests: criminal gangs profit from the departures, activists take over the passengers, lawyers and lobby groups assist them through the asylum process, while churches provide funding and moral legitimacy. European states then bear the costs of reception, accommodation and asylum proceedings.

In Germany, this system has not merely been tolerated but given an air of public respectability. In 2019, the Evangelical Church in Germany founded the United4Rescue alliance and raised money for the Sea-Watch 4 under the slogan “We are sending a ship”.

One of the country’s largest institutions thus openly aligned itself with an organization that repeatedly challenged Italy’s border policy. United4Rescue later contributed €200,000 ($228,000) toward the purchase of the Sea-Watch 5 and also supported its operations. Private activism thus grew into a fleet backed by church funding. At times, it also received German state subsidies.

New Footage Adds to Questions over Sea-Watch’s Role

The Frontex footage shows how this route operates in practice. Masked men bring the migrants alongside Sea-Watch’s inflatable boats, where they transfer in an orderly manner. The men then turn back, while the NGO vessel sets course for Europe.

https://twitter.com/seawatchcrew/status/2080216552389922914

For Italian investigators, the decisive question will be whether the Sea-Watch 5 was responding to an acute emergency at sea or waiting for the vessel at a predetermined location. Any radio communications and positioning data will also be crucial, as will the question of who coordinated the migrants’ journey to the meeting point.