On 4 August, the Maersk Etienne, a chemical tanker making its way across the Mediterranean, rescued 27 migrants about 70 nautical miles north of the Libyan coast. A month later, the ship remains stranded in international waters with no country apparently willing to take in the people rescued. The Danish shipping company Maersk Tankers, which owns the vessel, told me that the rescue was coordinated by the Maltese coast guard – yet Malta refuses to let the ship into port, and other states have been unwilling to step in and help. The crew say they are now running out of food and water, and that they are worried about the mental health of their guests, among them one pregnant woman and one child.
This grim new record – Maersk believes that this is the longest that migrants have ever been held aboard a commercial ship – marks a further deterioration of humanitarian rescue at Europe’s southern frontier. The UN convention on the Law of the Sea places a duty on all ships to rescue people in distress, and bring them to a place of safety. Yet in the last few years, European governments have sought to shut off unwanted migration routes from Africa and Asia by scaling back state-run search-and-rescue operations, harassing NGO ships – and, increasingly, by refusing vessels permission to disembark.
Photographs shown to me by Maersk Tankers indicate that the passengers are living in rudimentary conditions, some sleeping with blankets directly on the ship’s metal decks. “Living conditions for them are horrible,” said the ship’s captain, Volodymyr Yeroshkin, who explained on a video call that the tanker only had enough berths for its 21-strong crew. Yeroshkin is concerned about the mental health of his guests; according to Maersk Tankers, one passenger threatened to throw themselves overboard. “Staying on the ship is one thing when you are occupied with work, but staying on the ship as a hostage and not being able to move anywhere is another story,” Yeroshkin said. Normally, commercial vessels that rescue people at sea would only expect to accommodate them for two to three days.
The Maersk Etienne is not the first vessel to be stranded at sea in this fashion in recent months. Last weekend, the Louise Michel, an NGO rescue ship funded by the artist Banksy, was at the centre of a stand-off with Italian authorities after it rescued 219 people off the coast of Libya. Vulnerable passengers were only allowed to disembark in Sicily after the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR, made an urgent appeal. More broadly, a combination of factors have led countries on the EU’s southern and eastern edges to take increasingly hardline policies at sea this year. While the coronavirus pandemic prompted Italy and Malta to declare their ports unsafe for migrants during the spring, Greece has been accused of setting migrants adrift in the Aegean Sea, in an effort to push them back to Turkey.
Malta has taken a particularly hardline stance. After the country closed its ports in March, it held hundreds of rescued migrants in quarantine on tourist vessels anchored in international waters. The following month, a New York Times investigation accused the Maltese government of having assembled a fleet of private merchant vessels to intercept migrants at sea and return them to Libya, where torture and abuse are widespread. In July, another commercial vessel, a livestock carrier called the MV Talia, was asked by the Maltese coastguard to rescue 52 people at sea, and was then refused permission to dock by both Malta and Italy.
But the problem is European. The Mediterranean is an EU border, and governments see a collective interest in policing it, yet it largely remains the responsibility of individual states to accommodate people who are rescued. Malta, which has a population of 500,000, has complained that it is being asked to do an unfair share of the work: although the number of people crossing the Mediterranean is nothing like it was a few years ago, at the peak of the refugee crisis, around 2,000 rescued migrants have disembarked in Malta this year. “The migrants are not coming here,” a government source told the Times of Malta last month, in reference to the Maersk Etienne. “We are talking to other European states to see how we can share the burden.”
This lack of solidarity means that the lives of vulnerable people now hang in the balance. Although the UNHCR, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and 28 members of the European parliament have called for swift and safe disembarkation, the Maersk Etienne’s calls for help are still going unanswered. The Danish-flagged ship has also been denied permission to dock in Tunisia, and has so far received no response to a request for help from Denmark. “It is really shameful what the authorities are doing to us,” said Yeroshkin. “The crew did their job honourably. But the people we rescued are abandoned and the vessel is paralysed. We need action.”
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe