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Sea "rescue" operations in the Mediterranean are breaking international laws

Recently it has been in the news how Italy turned a "rescue" boat away from its shores, without allowing the ship with hundred-or-so migrants to enter the country. The ship then sailed to Spain, where they were allowed to enter.

What these news reports seldom point out is that this European "rescue" ship actually broke international laws to do so. According to international maritime laws, any sea rescue operation ought to transport the victims to the closest safe harbor. In this case, according to international agreements, that would have been Tunisia. Instead, the boat sailed all the way to Spain, which was at least ten times farther away.


The problem with most of these "rescue" boats operating in the Mediterranean is that they aren't run by some neutral maritime rescue organization. Instead, they are run by politically driven organizations with open borders policies, which want to bring as many immigrants to Europe as possible. This wasn't a "rescue" operation. This was quite clearly a "bring these migrants inside the EU borders" operation.

Many critics have speculated that these "rescue" operations are in fact more or less in cahoots with the African human traffickers (at least implicitly, if not explicitly). The African human traffickers (who are being paid money by these migrants who want to enter Europe) simply load migrants into cheap boats, sail a few tens of kilometers off the African coast, only to have an European "rescue" boat pick them up, which will then sail hundreds of kilometers to Europe. In other words, these European "rescue" operations are pretty much working with the African human traffickers. (There might not be an explicit verbal agreement between them, and the agreement might be implicit, just formed out of serendipity, but this seems to nevertheless what's happening.)

The human traffickers are getting rich from these operations. The migrants are gathering whatever money they can get and paying the traffickers to get a place in the boat. These European "rescue" operations are helping this scheme, and deliberately bringing as many migrants to Europe as they can.

None of this has anything at all to do with the Syrian war, or any war whatsoever. Almost none of these migrants are from Syria. They are from all over the place. Some are from as far as Bangladesh (which is on the East side of India).

The inflood of economic migrants into Europe is not stopping, nor even slowing down. It's only increasing. It's still estimated that between half and one million economic migrants are entering Europe every single year, and the numbers seem to in fact be increasing. The importing of migrants has become more and more systematic, with the help of European organizations. It's not going to stop any time soon. And the EU, like the mafia they are, is forcing all EU member countries to "share the burden", or face fines. In other words, extortion. Par for the course for organized crime.

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