Boat capsizes taking toll in Mediterranean to 987

At least 57 people have died after a migrant boat capsized off the Libyan coast, taking the total death toll in the central Mediterranean in 2021 to almost 1,000 – four times as many as in the same period last year.

Flavio Di Giacomo, Italy’s spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said the shipwreck had raised the death toll to 987.

An initial reconstruction of events suggested that the boat, carrying people mostly from Nigeria, Ghana and Gambia, ran into trouble a few hours after the departure and capsized off Khoms in windy conditions.

Seventy years ago, the 1951 UN refugee convention established the rights of refugees to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them. Increasingly, it seems that much of Europe is choosing to commemorate the anniversary by ripping up some of the convention’s core principles.

So far this year, close to 1,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, more than four times the death toll for the same period in 2020. Many will have been economic migrants. Others will have been fleeing persecution. Increasingly, Europe does not care. All were “irregular”. And all must be discouraged and deterred.

The latest tragedy occurred last week, when at least 57 people died as a boat capsized in high winds off the Libyan coast. Sea patrols have been significantly scaled back, making such disasters more likely. As Europe sits on its hands, thousands more desperate seafarers are being returned by Libyan security forces to detention centres.

In Greece, vast numbers are stuck in limbo, many in squalid overcrowded camps. After the fire at the Moria camp in Lesbos last September, the European Commission rushed out a new “pact on migration and asylum”, emphasising the need to balance border protection and humanitarian concerns. But there is still no agreement between EU member states on resettlement quotas. Meanwhile deafening “sound cannons” have been deployed on the Greek border with Turkey to drive migrants away, and a Trumpian steel wall has been erected. Its next task may be to block Afghans fleeing the Taliban.

There have been multiple accounts of refugees being expelled without their asylum applications being heard. Such so-called “pushbacks” contravene the 1951 convention. Politicians are also playing fast and loose with other principles signed up to 70 years ago. Denmark’s Social Democratic government has passed a law to enable asylum seekers to be relocated thousands of miles away, while their claims are processed in a third country. The government is seeking to forcibly return hundreds of refugees to Syria

– a move that is likely to be contested in the European court of human rights. Britain has criminalised migrants arriving by irregular routes.

Inexorably, unethically, Europe is defaulting to a cruel “fortress” strategy based on brute force and deterrence. Yet refugees make up only 0.6% of the EU’s population. The number of irregular migrants seeking to enter Europe bears no comparison to six years ago, when the Syrian civil war was at its height and Angela Merkel insisted: “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do it”). But the political will is missing. Since the migration crisis of 2015, the populist right has been allowed to dictate the terms of debate.

Spooked by the rise of Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Marine Le Pen – and, in Britain, the influence of Nigel Farage – mainstream politicians have hardened their hearts and muffled their consciences. This lack of moral ambition betrays the spirit of the great humanitarian breakthrough made seven decades ago