Ray Bugeja’s father was left asking himself what he did wrong when six soldiers armed with machine guns boarded his fishing boat after he had assisted migrants.
The incident happened some years back when the fishing boat with five crew members stopped to help migrants in distress.
After informing the Maltese authorities, the crew provided water and food and watched over the migrant boat until an army patrol boat arrived on the scene.
It was after the patrol boat took on the migrants that six soldiers on a dinghy boarded the fishing vessel, separated the boat master from the rest of the crew and conducted a search of the vessel.
The obligation to save lives at sea should trump any other consideration
Mr Bugeja, a veteran fisherman and National Fisheries Cooperative secretary, got a flashback of this incident when asked for his reaction to a maritime expert’s statement last week that ship captains feared the legal hassle that followed after helping refugees.
“Unfortunately, the fear is a reality even among fishermen,” Mr Bugeja said. He recalled his father’s shock at being greeted by machine-gun wielding soldiers as if they had done something wrong. It was such instances that forced boat masters into thinking twice about rescuing migrants, he added. “Unfortunately, fishermen end up asking themselves whether they need this hassle when all they did was save people from drowning,” he said.
Under the International Law of the Sea, mariners are obliged to give assistance in cases where people are in danger at sea.
But speaking at a seminar in Malta last week, Captain Wolf-Peter Rabitz said some merchant vessels failed to assist migrants because of the legal difficulties that ensued when it came to their disembarkation.
It could take days for the migrants to be allowed to leave the vessel and the legal consequences could last several years, Capt. Rabitz said. The situation gets more complicated when the commercial vessel with rescued migrants on board gets caught up in a wrangle between two or more states about where the asylum seekers should disembark.
Last year the MV Salamis faced such a difficulty after picking up 102 migrants. Both Italy and Malta ordered the ship to return to Libya before Italy relented and allowed the migrants to disembark on its shores.
For Mr Bugeja it is incidents like these that create apprehension among seafarers, including members of the fishing community.
“This can lead to instances of non-cooperation by some,” he said.
Organisations that work with asylum seekers have called on states to adopt smoother procedures when dealing with commercial vessels that rescue migrants at sea.
There have been instances when migrants rescued at sea claimed to have been ignored by commercial ships and fishing vessels.
Fr Alfred Vella from the Emigrants’ Commission acknowledged the difficulties ship captains faced in such circumstances.
“It is more than natural that they face these dilemmas because they will have to shoulder the consequences but the obligation to save lives at sea should trump any other consideration,” he said.
But it is not just these circumstances that create legal conundrums. Fr Vella said there were isolated cases when pregnant women rescued in international waters by a commercial vessel gave birth on the ship.
“Circumstances like these create legal ambiguities on the place of birth of the child – should it be the State where the ship is registered, the country where the migrants disembark or the country from where the woman would have left?”
ksansone@timesofmalta.com