Shameful EU move that will cost lives

The plight of refugees trying to reach southern Europe in open boats is already horrendous. But the European Union, with full British support, wants to make it worse. It has made the shocking and shameful decision to let the Italian navy close down its search-and-rescue operation in the Mediterranean without replacing it with something equally effective. Instead, it is proposed that the EU will sponsor a limited effort to patrol just Italian coastal waters. What happened beyond those limits would become nobody’s business.

The one thing that is certain is that this decision, if allowed to stand, will cost many innocent lives. Indeed, unbelievable though it may seem, it is intended to do precisely that. That is the logic, as set out by the British Government and agreed by other EU countries, of withdrawing search and rescue on the grounds that the very presence of this life-saving service was acting as a “pull” factor. It was said to encourage more refugees to start out on the dangerous voyage to European shores, because they apparently believed that if they found themselves in peril on the sea, search-and-rescue helicopters and naval vessels would pull them to safety and take them to a European port where they could claim asylum. But first, for this tactic to work, some will have to drown. Otherwise the message will not be received and believed by those for whom it is intended.

Signalling by drowned corpses is an unspeakable method of conducting immigration policy. In any event, the pull factor argument is not based on any evidence – how could it be? It flies in the face of the astonishing determination of refugees who have fled intolerable conditions in their home countries. If they have not been deterred by the fearful hazards they have already overcome, which kill as many as half the refugees involved, what reason is there to suppose they will be deterred by one hazard more? That is the point made by the Italian commander of the naval Mare Nostrum operation, Admiral Filippo Maria Foffi. “If someone is speaking about a ‘pulling factor’, he doesn’t know what he is speaking about,” he said this week. Mare Nostrum was started at about the time Pope Francis visited the island of Lampedusa after a particularly harrowing loss of life last year. The admiral hinted that the Italian navy was keen to continue with it.

The numbers likely to be at risk are enormous. The Italian navy’s existing humanitarian operation has, greatly to its credit, rescued some 150,000 people so far with about 3,000 people known to have drowned in spite of it. On reaching European soil, most if not all the refugees concerned will have valid grounds for asylum. But except in a tiny number of cases, they cannot register their claims from outside the EU. While Europe cannot solve the problems driving this unprecedented refugee exodus from places such as Syria, it could at least rationalise the asylum process so that applications from refugees can be dealt with at the point of departure rather than of arrival. It is almost incredible that anyone thinks that letting them drown is a civilised alternative.