Abstract
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played a crucial role in conducting Search and Rescue (SAR) operations off the Libyan coast, assisting almost 120,000 migrants between 2014 and 2019. Their activities, however, have been increasingly criticized. The accusation that NGOs facilitate irregular migration has escalated into investigations by Italian and Maltese courts and various policy initiatives restricting non-governmental ships and their access to European ports. Although all NGOs investigated to date have been acquitted, the combination of criminal investigations and policy restrictions that has taken place in Italy since 2017 has severely hindered non-governmental SAR operations. Given the humanitarian repercussions of reducing NGOs’ presence at sea, the merits and shortcomings of the arguments underlying the criminalization of non-governmental maritime rescue warrant in-depth research. To that end, this article fulfils two interrelated tasks. First, it provides a genealogy of the accusation against NGOs and the ensuing combination of legal criminalization, policy restrictions, and social stigmatization in restraining their activities. Second, it uses quantitative data to show that empirically verifiable accusations like the claim that NGOs serve as a pull factor of migration, thereby causing more people to day at sea, are not supported by available evidence. By doing so, our study sheds new light onto the criminalization of humanitarianism and its implications.
Highlights
The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to relieve the humanitarian implications of large-scale human mobility have come under close scrutiny
By 2017, the suspicion that NGOs were serving as a “pull factor” of illegal immigration or even operating in collusion with human smugglers escalated into both criminal investigations and several policy initiatives restricting non-governmental rescue missions
As illustrated in the previous section, no investigation to date has proven NGOs’ direct involvement in unlawful activities. According to both Frontex and Italian law enforcement authorities, NGOs may still indirectly facilitate irregular migration and thereby contribute to increasing casualties at sea by serving as a pull factor of irregular migration. This seemingly plausible suspicion has served as the cornerstone of the discourses stigmatizing non-governmental maritime rescue and played a key role in enabling the policy restrictions and criminal investigations mentioned in the previous section
Summary
The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to relieve the humanitarian implications of large-scale human mobility have come under close scrutiny. Most studies are been exclusively qualitative and have not systematically examined whether the accusations formulated against humanitarian workers are confirmed by available quantitative evidence As it enacted several policy restrictions and launched 18 investigations on NGOs between 2017 and February 2020, Italy is a crucial case for the study of the criminalization of humanitarianism. Since the Central Mediterranean corridor connecting Italy to Libya is the deadliest migratory route worldwide, Rome’s attempt at restricting non-governmental SAR operations may have especially problematic implications for human security at sea. An indirect role in SAR operations has been played by Alarm Phone, an NGO operating a hotline for migrants in distress in the Mediterranean Sea. Neither the non-governmental provision of maritime rescue nor its criminalization is an entirely new phenomenon.
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