These measures must never become the normality. It must always hurt us deeply in our hearts, because otherwise, we lose nothing less than the human right to life. A joint statement by Sea-Eye, German Doctors, Refugee Rescue and United4Rescue.
During the night from Wednesday to Thursday, a distress call reached the SEA-EYE 4 via AlarmPhone. 24 people were in distress in a small wooden boat in the Maltese search and rescue zone and called for help. Malta, meanwhile, remained silent.
Once again, Malta abandons refugees in distress at sea to their fate and refuses to provide any assistance to a container ship of the Hapag-Lloyd shipping line. Finally, the German rescue coordination center in Bremen intervened and called the SEA-EYE 4 for help.
A Libyan warship circled the SEA-EYE 4 for 50 minutes, repeating threats several times to make the rescue ship change course. The ship was in international waters the entire time.
In a joint statement, several organisations support the initiative of the mayor of Lampedusa and Linosa to restructure the accommodation and distribution of refugees and to align it with human rights.
On the occasion of the SEA-EYE 4’s sixth rescue mission in total, Sea-Eye and German Doctors explicitly call on the German government to treat all fleeing people equally and to demand the same from all other European member states.
A long mission comes to a good end! The crew is exhausted after hard days at sea. No wonder, because the mission already started with strong waves and various distress calls challenged the SEA-EYE 4.
In 24 hours, the SEA-EYE 4 received three distress calls. She was only able to come to the aid of one boat. One boat is missing. The people on another boat were forcibly pulled back to the civil war.
In 4 meter high waves, Captain Vasyl Maksymenko and the crew of his container ship rescued refugees from a wooden boat who had already spent 3 days at sea. But that’s not all: After the rescue operation, the captain and his crew fill the Geneva Refugee Convention with life.
On board the SEA-EYE 4, Monique told her harrowing story to our crew member Fiona just before Christmas. It gives us an insight into the fate of the young woman, the dangers on the flight as well as the hell in Libya.