Fra is the Project Coordinator of the Sea-Watch 5. Together with our Guest Care Coordinator Lorenz and a large, multidisciplinary team, they have spent the last few months converting the Sea-Watch 5 into a rescue ship. I spoke with them about the recent shipyard period and the exciting weeks ahead. The time for the…
Urgent warning: Increased deaths at sea, NGO vessels detained – European states must stop obstructing civilian search and rescue efforts in the Central Mediterranean Up to 600 people lost their lives in another avoidable shipwreck off the Greek coast in June 2023. As civil society, we are horrified by the preventable deaths in the Central…
After a ~37-hour rescue operation, assisting the civil rescue organization Open Arms and rescuing 72 people from distress at sea, the Sea-Watch ship Aurora was detained on Monday afternoon by Italian authorities. Sea-Watch denounces the fabrication of reasons for the detention of the ship. Although the situation on board after the rescue deteriorated by the…
Download Factsheet [PDF] This factsheet presents a summary of the distress cases witnessed in March 2023 by Sea-Watch’s Airborne Operations with the aircraft Seabird 2.1 In March 2023, we conducted 12 operations over a total flight time of 77 hours and 14 minutes. We spotted 62 boats, carrying over 2.091 persons2 in distress at sea.…
In 2022, 105,131 people arrived to Italy by sea, mainly from Tunisia and Libya. In Malta, however, the arrivals were only 444 people. In order to fully put these arrival figures into perspective, the mortality figures as well as numbers of illegal returns (pullbacks) committed by the Tunisian and the so-called Libyan Coast Guard in…
