NEWS | Wednesday, 03 December 2008

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Fishermen ignoring migrants in distress at sea – report

A report by the Today Public Policy Institute on migration and the need for a holistic government policy on the challenges ahead, warns that Maltese fishermen are absconding their legal obligations and ignoring calls to rescue African migrants on the Mediterranean sea.
The report says that while fishermen in principle play an important role in saving the lives of migrants in distress at sea, Maltese fishermen themselves claim they are “under threat” because of the insufficient support they receive from the government in coping with migrant encounters at sea.
The report says that according to the representatives of the country’s main fishermen association (Ghaqda Kooperative tas-Sajd), Maltese fishermen, who often sail with a crew of only two or three, usually avoid coming too close to a boat carrying 20 to 30 migrants, as they fear being overpowered.
“If they alert the authorities, these can take several hours to arrive on the spot, meaning that the fishermen’s day of work is lost without compensation. As a consequence, as Maltese fishermen themselves readily admit, in most cases when they come across irregular migrants at sea, they simply ‘put the engine on full thrust’, leaving the migrants to fend for themselves,” the report states.
The author of the report, Martin Scicluna, who is also advisor to the government on migration, says that from a humanitarian perspective, the situation is unacceptable: “some kind of mechanism should be introduced whereby fishermen, who as a consequence of rescue activities lose work, are compensated for this loss. Moreover, there is a need to inform Maltese fishermen more clearly about their international law obligations to rescue immigrants in situations of distress.”

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