the authorities should have intervened earlier, according to Doctors Without Borders

The European and Greek authorities should have intervened earlier to avoid the sinking of a migrant boat off Greece overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, said Jérôme Tubiana, head of migration advocacy at Doctors Without Borders, on franceinfo this Wednesday . According to the latest report, this Wednesday, June 14 at 5:30 p.m., 78 people died of drowning.

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The boat had been spotted by a plane from the European Border Surveillance Agency (Frontex) on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s really shocking to hear that Frontex flew over the boat and there was no intervention because the boat refused any help“, protests Jérôme Tubiana. “An overloaded boat is a boat in distress, so there is no question of its condition or its ability to continue its course.“, he explains.

Frontex”has already been singled out, particularly in this area in Greece, for having organized with Greece completely illegal deportations of asylum seekers to Turkey“, continues Jérôme Tubiana. According to him, this refoulement pushes migrants to take more dangerous routes to arrive in Europe and increases the risk of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Doctors Without Borders noted “a sharp increase in mortality, proportionally, when the European Union decided to end its naval operation which until then extended including in the Libyan search and rescue zone“. The European Union suspended its deployment of boats in the Mediterranean Sea in 2019.