03/07/2012 Migration, International Protection and Economic Co-operation
Strasbourg, 03.07.2012 – Tineke Strik (Netherlands, SOC), whose inquiry for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) uncovered a “catalogue of failures” that led to the deaths of 63 people fleeing Libya by sea after their distress calls were ignored, will present her findings to the Human Rights Committee of the Italian Senate on 4 July in Rome.
Her report concluded that “many opportunities for saving the lives of the persons on board were lost” and that the Italian authorities were among those who shared responsibility for the tragedy: “Italy, as the first State to receive the distress call, should have taken responsibility for the co-ordination of the seach-and-rescue operation.”
Two days later, on 6 July, Senator Strik will be the keynote speaker at a seminar in Brussels organised by the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) during which she is due to debate her findings with a former NATO legal adviser, a representative of the EU’s border agency Frontex and a representative of the European Commission, among others. The report also concluded that NATO had “failed to react to distress calls” in a military zone under its control.