An NGO migrant “taxi” ship has been fined 10,000 euros and placed into administrative detention for 20 days for violating a security decree enacted by the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
The Doctors Without Borders (MSF) ship Geo Barents was placed into administrative detention in the port of Augusta after dropping off 48 migrants in the port of Ancona earlier this month.
According to a statement from MSF, the ship has also been fined €10,000 (£8,829/$10,544) for violating a migration security decree intended to regulate the activity of migrant “taxi” NGOs operating in the Mediterranean.
It is the first vessel to violate the decree, Il Giornale reports.
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“We are evaluating the legal actions to be taken to contest the incident. It is not acceptable to be punished for saving lives,” MSF complained.
“The Port Authority of Ancona accuses us, in light of the new decree, of not having provided all the information requested during the last rotation that ended with the landing in Ancona,” the group added.
Since forming her government last year, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been adamant about wanting to tackle illegal immigration and the activities of migrant transports, which brought well over 10,000 illegals to Italy last year alone — around a tenth of the over 100,000 who arrived overall.
“International law does not provide that there is someone who can make a ferry in the Mediterranean or in any other sea, and go back and forth to transfer people from one country to another,” Meloni said in January.
“The rules want to limit the rescue of migrants to what is required by international law, with some fairly simple rules: if you come across a boat and rescue people you have to bring them to safety, so you do not keep them on board by continuing to do other multiple rescues until the ship is full. Otherwise, in this case, it is not the accidental rescue of the shipwrecked,” she said.
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Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi stated as early as October that he wanted to halt migrant “taxi “activity, saying NGO vessels were “not in line with the spirit of European and Italian rules on security and border control and the fight against illegal immigration.”
Piantedosi, who is largely the driving force behind the border decree, even proposed confiscating the vessels of NGOs that violate the decree.
In January, many of the NGOs protested against the decree, which requires they drop off migrants immediately after picking them up, rather than spending days at sea picking up more migrants from different boats in different locations.
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