The Italian authorities have authorized the ship ‘Geo Barents’, managed by the NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF), to dock at the port of Salerno so that the 248 migrants and refugees currently on board can get off, as reported. the organization itself.
MSF, which has warned of bad weather conditions in the area, expects it to take around 24 hours to reach Salerno. “Having a safe place to land is good news for all survivors, after the traumatic experiences they have had to deal with,” he said on Twitter.
Until now, only specific evacuations had been authorized from the ‘Geo Barents’, including that of a 14-year-old boy with abdominal pain and that of a mother and her four children -all of them under eleven years old-, after for the woman to give birth on board.
The coordinator of MSF’s search and rescue operations, Juan Matias Gil, lamented that “the same situation is repeated over and over again”, since the absence of a disembarkation mechanism causes, in the best of cases, delays in the transfer to land of migrants.
“We are not begging, we are simply asking Malta and Italy to comply with their legal obligations. It is not acceptable to wait days, a week or more. Let’s stop playing with human lives,” Gil claimed.
The new Government of Italy, headed by the ultra-rightist Giorgia Meloni, has promised to be stricter with these permits, which recently resulted in a crossing of another ship, the ‘Ocean Viking’, to France. At least 1,362 people have died this year in the central Mediterranean alone, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
