Italian rescue ship Vos Prudence run by NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres arrives in July, 2017, in the port of Salerno carrying 935 migrants, including 16 children and 7 pregnant women rescued from the Mediterranean sea.NurPhoto/ Press Association. All rights reserved.In the context of the ‘refugee crisis’[1] in and around the Mediterranean, the European Union is devoting its resources to the exclusion of refugees and migrants using increased surveillance and militarization of its borders, by affiliation with entities and States for whom human rights are not a priority. With an enormous death toll at sea and huge numbers arriving, civil society across Europe has mobilized to manifest alternative values of hospitality to welcome refugees and solidarity towards those at the borders. This paper will survey human rights reports and activist materials to consider these two phenomena, before asking questions about the scope for artists to respond to the refugee crisis.
Four years ago, in October 2014, Operation Mare Nostrum, the Italian government’s humanitarian mission in the Mediterranean to rescue people in boats in peril on journeys from Libya, was terminated. The replacement Frontex (EU) mission, Operation Triton, part-funded by voluntary contributions from the Irish state, has a markedly lesser focus on search-and-rescue and an increased focus on surveillance and “border security”.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says that deaths at sea have risen nine times since the ending of Operation Mare Nostrum.[2] Its ‘Missing Migrants Project’ documents minimum estimated deaths in the Mediterranean: 401 at the time of writing for the first weeks of 2018. The organization, “Death by Rescue”, has analysed migrant shipwrecks which have led to the deaths of many in the Mediterranean. It documents that, to fill the void left by the substantial withdrawal of state-led search-and-rescue activities, commercial ships became the primary search-and-rescue actors in the central Mediterranean, rescuing 11,954 people between 1 January and 20 May 2015 alone but also apparently playing a major role in deaths because of their lack of specialist capacity to provide such missions (thus, “death by rescue”).
