The Airborne Annual Report 2024 provides an overview of the findings of Sea-Watch’s airborne monitoring of human rights violations in the central Mediterranean Sea during 2024.
Together with the Swiss organization Humanitarian Pilots Initiative (HPI), Sea-Watch operates the two monitoring aircraft Seabird 1 and Seabird 2. Starting from Lampedusa, the aircraft patrol the central Mediterranean Sea between the coasts of Libya, Tunisia and Italy. In this region alone, 25,060 people drowned over the past 10 years due to non-assistance by European coastal states, backed by the European Union. Despite this politically-caused state of emergency, the EU has not established a European search and rescue operation. Instead, the EU relies on surveillance and violent militias to forcibly hinder people fleeing torture and inhumane treatment and stop them from reaching safety.
Political Analysis 2024: The Systematic Disregard of Human Rights
The year 2024 was a year in which the open call to disregard human rights by allegedly democratic European actors became systematic. While human rights were under attack since their declaration and have never been actual rights but rather an unredeemed promise, 2024 was the year in which the promise was revoked altogether. While war and genocide raged in Sudan, Gaza, and Congo, the European discourse around migration and asylum reached an unprecedented level of open racism.
In this political analysis, we will keep the focus on developments directly related to the situation in the central Mediterranean Sea.