A group of italian lawmakers has asked the Italian government to start an investigation with european organizations and interested countries to give an identity to migrants who have died at sea and remain unidentified.
The MPs have asked that the government investigate and identify around 60 percent of migrant bodies found in the Mediterranean, which have thus far remained nameless.The call, they said, was made for humanitarian reasons but also to prevent terror groups from using the dead persons' names. The parliamentary motion asking to identify all retrieved bodies was signed by Milena Santerini of the group "Democrazia Solidale - Centro Democratico." ''We are asking the government to support a job that is already being done," explained Santerini, adding, "There is an inter-institutional task force, with the ministries of interior, defense, navy, coastal guards and Red Cross, along with 10 universities, that has created a system to collect data. We should boost all levels and create a European data bank". The motion asks the government to support the task force, help gather data after migrant deaths, strengthen the office of the commissioner for missing people and share the identification process with other EU countries. "We have a group of families in Senegal and Mali who gathered data and don't know who to give them to," said Cristina Cattaneo, director of the anthropology and dentistry forensic department of the University of Milan. "The case concerns orphans who are left alone and cannot ask to join families in Europe because their parents have not been declared dead. Now that the system has been proven to work, it would be a terrible pity not to respect these victims," she added. One project in Italy is already helping identify victims of one of the most deadly shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, which happened on April 18, 2015, when a boat carrying an estimated 800 people onboard drowned in the waters. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), about 30,000 migrants have died at sea over the past 15 years. Over 5,000 died in 2016 - the year with the most number of deaths so far in the Mediterranean "cemetery." Over 500 had succumbed to the rough journey until the beginning of March this year.
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