Saving Lives At Sea: Security, Law and Adverse Effects

In the wake of recent shipwrecks at the Strait of Sicily, the European Union and its Member States have come under renewed pressure to address rescue at sea. Saving lives at sea is not simply a question of enhancing EU rescue efforts, however, but requires eliminating third party sanctions that significantly impede the proper functioning of the international rescue regime. This article focuses on anti-smuggling laws and related instruments and their thorny relation to humanitarian acts. To improve rescue efforts at sea, as a first step all humanitarian acts need to be exempted from criminal sanctions. This needs to be accompanied by efforts to desecuritize rescue, separating rescue from border security concerns

A critical review of the Mediterranean sea turtle rescue network: a web looking for a weaver

A key issue in conservation biology is recognizing and bridging the gap between scientific results and specific action. We examine sea turtles—charismatic yet endangered flagship species—in the Mediterranean, a sea with historically high levels of exploitation and 22 coastal nations. We take sea turtle rescue facilities as a visible measure for implemented conservation action. Our study yielded 34 confirmed sea turtle rescue centers, 8 first-aid stations, and 7 informal rescue institutions currently in operation. Juxtaposing these facilities to known sea turtle distribution and threat hotspots reveals a clear disconnect. Only 14 of the 22 coastal countries had centers, with clear gaps in the Middle East and Africa. Moreover, the information flow between centers is apparently limited. The populations of the two species nesting in the Mediterranean, the loggerhead Caretta caretta and the green turtle Chelonia mydas, are far below historical levels and face a range of anthropogenic threats at sea and on land. Sea turtle rescue centers are acknowledged to reduce mortality in bycatch hotspots, provide a wealth of scientific data, and raise public awareness. The proposal for a Mediterranean-wide rescue network as published by the Regional Activity Centre for Specially Protected Areas a decade ago has not materialized in its envisioned scope. We discuss the efficiency, gaps, and needs for a rescue network and call for establishing additional rescue centers and an accompanying common online database to connect existing centers. This would provide better information on the number and types of rescue facilities on a Mediterranean scale, improve communication between these facilities, enhance standardization of procedures, yield large-scale data on the number of treated turtles and their injuries, and thus provide valuable input for targeted conservation measures

Guilt by association? The criminalisation of sea rescue NGOs in Italian media

The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rescuing migrants off the coast of Libya have been increasingly criminalised. We investigate the discursive underpinnings of this process by analyzing all the articles on sea rescue NGOs published between 2014 and 2019 by two major Italian newspapers located at opposite sides of the political spectrum: Il Giornale and La Repubblica. Our discourse analysis shows that the media salience of non-governmental sea rescue increased enormously following the first public allegations against humanitarians and peaked in 2019 after some standoffs between some NGOs and the Italian government, when the number of migrants rescued at sea had already dropped to a minimum. This inflated and heavily politicised media coverage contains both direct and indirect criminalisation discourses. Though sometimes directly accused of colluding with human smugglers and profiting from irregular migration, sea rescue NGOs have more often been indirectly criminalised through the same framing devices typically used to stigmatise irregular mobility at large, namely associational links, metaphors, frame-jacking, and othering

Disembarkation Options of Illegal Migrants Rescue at Sea

The issue of rescuing distress people at sea, is a very important issue for Indonesia, particularly because it is an archipelagic country situated between two oceans and two continents and it becomes a major route for migrants due to its various maritime straits and the ‘porous’ coastlines. These geographical factors have also exacerbated some of the problems, particularly of some undocumented migrants and refugees passing through Indonesia, either by land, sea, or by air. The flow of illegal migrants to or through Indonesia has increased in recent years, particularly from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Iraq, Iran, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, that require comprehensive solution, either domestically, bilaterally, or regionally

Shifting Bordering and Rescue Practices in the Central Mediterranean Sea, October 2013–October 2015

This counter‐mapping project illustrates the areas of intervention of different operations geared toward rescue and enforcement between 2013 and 2015, including the Italian Navy's “Mare Nostrum” search and rescue mission, the EU border agency Frontex's “Triton” enforcement operation, the humanitarian interventions of commercial vessels, and the action of civil‐society rescue vessels such as those operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF—Doctors Without Borders). The project offers a spatial understanding of the Mediterranean border‐scape, the practices of rescue and enforcement that occur within it, and the risk of sea‐crossing at this particular moment. Through these maps, the Central Mediterranean Sea emerges as a striking laboratory from which novel legal arrangements, surveillance technologies, and institutional assemblages converge

Dynamics simulation research on load vehicle of deep submergence rescue vehicle (LV-DSRV)

Submarine accidents can cause loss of human life and economy, as well as environment damage. Also submarine rescue is difficult for the complexity of rescue process and the uncertainty of the sea state. Success of rescue process is determined by reliability and safety of rescue device. Therefore, research on related device design is rather important. The existing knowledge always supplies some empirical formulas and generates a design scheme by general design rules. The scheme plan obtained may not be a good one due to simplicity of mechanical calculation analysis and particularity of design requirements. To improve design safety and reliability of shipborne device on submarine rescue system, dynamics simulation model of LV-DSRV based on sea state excitation was created in this paper. Wave excitation input at sea state 5 and 8 was considered as the extreme marine working conditions. Kinetic property of LV-DSRV was calculated making use of virtual prototype technology through ADAMS software, and mechanical characteristics of key parts were also analyzed. Optimization strategy was proposed and verified by increasing the number of horizontal wheels and adding gap between horizontal wheels and the track, providing with a case study for similar marine special mechanism design