Shipping Industry Urges ‘Immediate Action’ to Humanitarian Crisis in Mediterranean Sea

European and international shipowner teams and seafarer unions have banded collectively to induce EU Member States to take rapid motion to handle the rising humanitarian disaster within the Mediterranean Sea.

Since 2014, tons of of hundreds of migrants have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to succeed in Europe in overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, ensuing within the lack of hundreds of lives.

In a joint letter to leaders of all 28 EU Members States, the European Community Shipowners’ Associations (ECSA), the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF), the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS) and the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) have warned that the disaster is spiraling uncontrolled, and that we will anticipate additional catastrophic lack of life until EU Member States reply with higher urgency.

The shipowner teams and unions are calling on all EU Member States to offer rapid precedence to growing assets for Search and Rescue operations, in view of the very massive variety of doubtlessly harmful rescues now being performed by service provider ships.

According to a joint assertion concerning the letter, in 2014 service provider ships rescued round 40,000 individuals, with the quantity anticipated to extend dramatically. While the delivery business totally accepts its obligation to rescue anybody in misery at sea, the business argues that it’s unacceptable that the worldwide neighborhood more and more depends on service provider ships and their crews to undertake increasingly large-scale rescues. Single ships have needed to rescue as many as 500 individuals at a time, creating critical dangers to the well being and welfare of seafarers who’re unprepared and untrained to tackle such rescues, the assertion mentioned.

While the shipowners acknowledge that navies and coastguards of these EU Member States on the entrance strains have made spectacular efforts to reply, the scenario continues to worsen. The delivery business believes there have to be a commensurate improve in State funded assets for Search and Rescue operations, that means that each one EU Member States must share the monetary burden.

The delivery business additionally means that the EU and the worldwide neighborhood want to supply refugees and migrants with different technique of discovering security, with out risking their lives by crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats.

The delivery business says that the event of options to this disaster have to be handled as an absolute precedence as “it is literally a matter of life and death”. The shipowners’ representatives and unions are subsequently requesting that this challenge needs to be added, as a matter of actual urgency, to the agenda of the European Council and related conferences of EU Ministers.