“Ocean Viking”: In the port of Toulon in France, the ship with 231 migrants will tie up tomorrow – Condemns Italy’s refusal

The boat Ocean Viking will dock tomorrow, friday, in the port of Toulon in the south of Franceand “a third” of the migrants on board will “be resettled in France”, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanen announced today, while denouncing the “unacceptable behavior” of Italy.

The boat, now off Corsica with 231 migrants on board, is expected to arrive “Friday at the end of the morning” in Toulon, Darmanen said after the cabinet meeting.

“We welcome this vessel exceptionally, given the fifteen-day wait at sea that the Italian authorities forced those on board to endure,” the minister clarified after the end of the cabinet meeting.

He added that those on board who do not meet the criteria for asylum seekers “will be returned immediately”.

THE interior minister denounced Italy’s “incomprehensible choice” not to accept the vessel. Italy “chose not to behave as a responsible European state,” he added.

In protest, France decided to suspend “with immediate effect” the reception, as planned this summer, of 3,500 refugees now in Italy.

The Minister of the Interior recalled that a European mechanism allows the relocation to other European countries of refugees who arrive mainly in Italy within the framework of international law and the law of the sea.

He called on “all other participants (in this mechanism), especially Germany” to also suspend the planned reception of refugees now in Italy.

France will take steps to “strengthen border controls” with Italy, Darmanen said.

France “will also draw the necessary conclusions” about the Italian attitude on other sides of its “bilateral relationship”, the minister added.

NGO SOS Méditerranée, which charters the vessel, expressed “bittersweet relief” after it was announced that France had welcomed the vessel after 20 days at sea in search of a safe port. for the 234 immigrants which the Ocean Viking.

“The situation on the Ocean Viking shows how urgent it is for European countries to put in place a permanent allocation mechanism for migrants rescued in the Mediterranean,” SOS Méditerranée director Sophie Beau told AFP. “the torture experienced by the rescued on” the humanitarian rescue boat.

Earlier today, the French government approved the removal, on medical grounds, of three of the 234 migrants aboard the Ocean Viking, which remained stranded in the Mediterranean without permission to disembark, amid diplomatic tensions between the Europeans and Italy.

“The General Secretariat of the Sea, on the instructions of the Prime Minister, is implementing a sanitary removal operation at sea of ​​four migrants who are on the Ocean Viking,” the government said in a statement.

According to the NGO SOS Méditerranée, these are three migrants and an escort. They are “in a serious condition and require hospital treatment”.

“One of the patients is in an unstable condition and has not responded to the care provided on board since October 27. The other two suffered injuries in Libya which, due to a long delay in treatment, are now at risk of having negative effects in the long term,” a spokesperson for SOS Méditerranée told AFP.

Ocean Viking rescued these migrants, some of them nearly three weeks ago, between Libya and Italy while trying to reach Europe in makeshift boats.

yesterday, wednesday, the tension between France and Italy increased around the Ocean Viking, with Paris denouncing Rome’s “unacceptable” refusal to let it dock in an Italian port and Brussels calling for all migrants to be disembarked immediately.

The European Commission assessed yesterday that “the situation on the boat has reached a critical level and must be resolved urgently in order to avoid a humanitarian tragedy”.

Three other NGO boats managed to disembark the rescued migrants. In Italy, in Catania, since Sunday, the Geo Barrents of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the Humanity 1 of the German NGO of the same name have finally managed to disembark all their passengers on Tuesday night, then from an initial refusal of the Italian authorities to accept all the rescued.

At first, the Italian authorities had accepted only women, children and the sick, a screening that Rome described as a means of pressuring the EU to help Italy more. Rise Above, for its part, disembarked all 89 migrants and refugees it rescued in Calabria on Tuesday.

Since June, a relocation scheme, which saw a first phase in 2019, sees ten member states, including France and Germany, voluntarily accept 8,000 migrants arriving in countries such as Italy, which are close to the Libyan coasts.

However, only 164 migrants have been resettled in 2022 from Italy to other EU member states, of which 117 thanks to the mechanism adopted in June. An insufficient number, estimates Italy, which says some 88,100 migrants have reached its shores since January 1, only 14% of them via humanitarian rescue boats.

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