Mayors are sounding the alarm in southern Italy: reception centers for migrants are overcrowded, and there is growing resentment in the population. Other Mediterranean states also report rising numbers of arrivals.
A third lifeless body has been sighted floating in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast. Civil society groups have had no response to calls for action to recover and bury the bodies.
Sea-Watch has published a photo of the body of a dead migrant that reportedly has been floating in the Mediterranean for two weeks. The private rescue organization says that even though authorities in Libya, Malta and Italy had been informed, they did not retrieve the body.
The German NGO Sea-Watch has recently acquired a new aircraft in cooperation with the Swiss Humanitarian Pilots Initiative (HPI). The aircraft, which has been named Seabird, will be used for civil air reconnaissance missions off the coast of Libya, from where hundreds of migrants depart on makeshift boats to Europe every week . The new aircraft is an addition to the Moonbird, which has been active since 2017.
The private rescue ship Sea-Watch 3, run by the German organization Sea Watch, has been seized by Italian authorities after an inspection uncovered "administrative" and "safety" irregularities, which could "compromise the vessel, its crew and anyone who might be rescued by it."
52 people rescued from the Mediterranean on Saturday remain stranded on a livestock transport ship, MV Talia. Both Italy and Malta have denied them permission to disembark.
A year after she was arrested for bringing 53 rescued migrants ashore in Italy without permission, sea captain Carola Rackete says nothing has fundamentally changed for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The German activist also endorsed a campaign against the EU border agency Frontex.
After 28 migrants tested positive for the coronavirus, the Italian interior ministry has asserted that there is no health risk for the rest of the country because they have been quarantined. The COVID-19 positive migrants were among 211 people rescued by NGO Sea-Watch last week.
A total of 28 rescued migrants have tested positive for the coronavirus on the Moby Zazà quarantine ship, which is off the Sicilian port of Porto Empedocle. They are among a group of 211 migrants who were rescued by the German charity Sea-Watch last week.
While migrant landings in Italy in the first half of 2020 have nearly tripled compared to the first semester of 2019, quarantine rules against COVID-19 for migrants rescued at sea have taken center stage. A controversy was sparked by the fact that 67 people who were rescued by Italian vessel Mare Jonio were allowed to disembark in Pozzallo, Sicily, on June 20 while 211 migrants rescued a day later by the German Sea-Watch vessel were transferred to another ship to be quarantined.
Several people have died following another shipwreck along the Libyan coast over the weekend. The incident took place near the capital, Tripoli. The exact number of victims is so far unknown; however, according to initial reports, there were three bodies washed up on the beach near the town of Al-Zawiya, about 50 kilometers west of Tripoli.
Private migrant rescue vessels Sea-Watch 3 and Mare Jonio over the weekend disembarked close to 300 migrants on the Italian island of Sicily. The arrivals in Italy were the first of their kind since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.