Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has said the EU aids human traffickers through its policies and that it deliberately avoids conducting rescue operations for migrant boats in the Mediterranean. MSF denied last week's accusations from a Catania prosecutor that it was engaging in direct contact with traffickers.
The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders (MSF) strongly criticized European policies after an Italian prosecutor accused it and other NGOs involved in rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean Sea of colluding with traffickers and encouraging irregular migration. The organization said that the EU was behind a deliberate and unprecedented operation of "non-intervention" regarding people in danger.
"The NGOs do what Europe should be doing: saving human lives in the Mediterranean," the head of the Italian branch of MSF, Loris De Filippi, said during a press conference at the Foreign Press Association in Rome. The attacks on MSF and other NGOs rescuing people are "a pile of rubbish that we are subjected to on a daily basis," De Filippi said. "We are the healthiest part of this country, the part that brings aid to people regardless of their religion, gender and ideology, but for the next year in Italy, we will be in the midst of an election campaign and it is convenient to attack NGOs," he added.
At the italian parliament @MSF is reminding Europe that it's not NGOs facilitating smugglers, it's European policies https://t.co/FBdPPdHBas
— MSF Sea (@MSF_Sea) May 2, 2017
MSF's head of advocacy, Marco Bertotto, also denied that NGOs involved in rescuing migrants encouraged more refugees to come to Europe. "There is no scientific proof," he said, explaining that NGOs carried out only 30 percent of the rescues at sea.
The humanitarian group's statements come shortly after Carmelo Zuccaro, prosecutor of the eastern coastal city of Catania, said he had opened an investigation into the work of rescue NGOs. He claimed he had evidence of direct contact between NGOs and traffickers in Libya.
MSF's Bertotto said, "We have never been contacted by the Catania prosecutor's office, but we would be happy to provide information to the investigation," The group and other organizations operating rescue ships in the Mediterranean have been called "sea taxis" for migrants by some politicians.
The organization has also said that the EU's border management agency Frontex "is not a solution because it does not have a mandate to rescue migrants" and that NGOs were "not a political response."
"We are responding to the EU' incapacity to find a solution to deaths at sea'', he added.
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