Italian authorities have impounded a so-called ‘rescue ship,’ operated by the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for failing to cooperate with Italian border guards during its mission to pick up migrants from the Mediterranean Sea. Despite successfully cracking down on illegal migration, Giorgia Meloni’s conservative government continues to face foreign-funded NGOs that collude with human smugglers to take as many migrants as possible to Italy.
The ship in question, the Geo Barents is a rescue and salvage ship owned by a Norwegian company, and currently chartered by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). It has carried out ‘sea-rescue operations’ in the Mediterranean since June 2021.
Italian authorities ordered the boat’s sixty-day detention on Monday, August 26th after Geo Barents disembarked 191 rescued migrants at the port of Salerno, near Naples. The captain of the boat has been issued a fine of €3,300. Rome accused Geo Barents of endangering lives and failing to provide prompt information to Italian authorities during a night-time rescue in the central Mediterranean last Friday.
This is the third time the Geo Barents has been detained. The NGO filed an appeal against the decision. “We have been sanctioned for simply fulfilling our legal duty to save lives,” said Juan Matias Gil, who leads MSF’s Mediterranean search and rescue operations.
Boats operated by NGOs have contributed to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean by regularly taking on board migrants from human smugglers who bring the migrants to sea from the shores of Northern Africa on makeshift boats. Anti-immigration parties have denounced these methods as a major pull factor for migrants wanting to reach Europe.
The Meloni government has criticised countries that support these NGO boats, accusing them of sending migrants to Italy’s shores instead of welcoming them themselves. The Italian prime minister wrote a harshly worded letter last year to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, criticising the German government for awarding charities that operate migrant boats hundreds of thousands of euros.
“Once again, NGOs show that they want to act according to their own rules, bypassing the Italian ones and ignoring the sovereignty of the state, which has the right to regulate entry within its borders on the basis of certain rules. If they are not respected, there are sanctions, and there are other ports,” Italian conservative daily Il Giornale commented on the impounding of the Geo Barents.
The conservative Italian government has passed legislation to curb these boats’ activities. Rome has limited ships to one sea rescue at a time, and forces them to dock at an assigned port. It has also impounded ships whose crew are accused of deviating from a designated course.
Migrant rescue ships have been detained on 23 occasions since the enforcement of the new Italian laws in early 2023, reports Médecins Sans Frontières on its website.
Deterring NGOs from sending migrants to Italy is only one of the steps the Meloni government has taken to successfully drive down the number of illegal migrants. Rome recently registered an astonishing 62.4% drop in illegal arrivals in 2024, with 37,000 migrants landing in Italy as of August 12th compared to nearly 100,000 in the same period last year.
The government has shortened the asylum procedure, introduced more thorough age verification protocols, ramped up voluntary and involuntary returns, and allowed longer detention times to prevent failed asylum seekers from disappearing.
