Italian authorities have assigned NGO rescue vessels Sea-Watch 3 and the Open Arms with almost 240 rescued migrants on board the ports of Taranto and Messina, respectively. Four EU countries agreed to receive the migrants, yet a binding quota system for the distribution of migrants rescued at sea is still not in place.
The German sea rescue NGO Sea-Watch has accused the Maltese government of deliberate inaction when it comes to saving the lives of migrants and refugees in Mediterranean waters. In a series of tweets, the private sea rescue organization said that Maltese armed forces only appeared to intervene in such cases when they received according orders.
The German-run private rescue vessel Sea-Watch 3 has picked up around 120 migrants in three rescue operations in the central Mediterranean on Thursday and early Friday morning.
More than 150 organizations have pledged support to the "United4Rescue" initiative, launched by Germany's Protestant Church, which hopes to finance sea rescue efforts and send its own vessel into the Mediterranean Sea. The group is hoping to acquire a rescue ship in the near future.
More than 120,000 irregular migrants and refugees arrived in the EU this year, mostly by sea. Greece saw a dramatic increase in arrivals, while arrivals in Italy and Spain declined. We take a look at clandestine and irregular migration movements to Europe in 2019.
The charity ship Alan Kurdi reached a rubber boat carrying 32 migrants, ahead of an impending storm on the Mediterranean. According to the Sea-Eye rescue group, they all said they were Libyan citizens.
A series of five memorial "stumbling stones" have been placed at five schools in Rome in memory of a 14-year-old Malian student who died on a boat in the Mediterranean with his report card sewn into his pocket.
Four Tunisian mothers have been brought to the city of Agrigento in Sicily to identify the bodies of their children. They died when their boat sank off Lampedusa on October 7. The women were called up as part of a probe into the incident. Only two of the four mothers were able to identify the bodies of their children.
At least eight migrants are dead and another 24 are missing after a boat, thought to have been carrying between 90 and 100 migrants, capsized within sight of Spain’s southern coast just before dawn on December 16.
The film "Strange Fish", playing in this year's Global Migration Film Festival, tells the story of a group of fishermen in Zarzis, southern Tunisia, and how their lives have been affected by the migration which criss-crosses the waters in which they fish. InfoMigrants spoke to the film's director Giulia Bertoluzzi and one of the anonymous heroes, fisherman Chamseddine Bourassine.
After arriving in a small wooden fishing boat from Morocco, eight young North Africans are due to be offered asylum in Portugal. Some say the group had been aiming for Spain and got blown off course, others warn that Portugal could become a destination for migration in the future.
The German-based private rescue organization Sea-Watch announced that as of December 5 it was registered under the German flag. The organization said it had “insufficient confidence” in the Netherlands as a flag state.