Ironclad wrote:"regardless of "a mile or three" as long as there is someone in distress. So either we withdraw from the convention or will help and not let people drown. And in a similar fashion with other legal framework regarding migration. But .. it is not fair because smugglers are abusing such frameworks for their benefit? No, it is not fair. What is fair? Perhaps colonial history was fair? We have values and we ought to keep them. Else drop them. We cannot be the good guys without doing the good things."

What is wrong, would you say, with collecting these ships and returning them the few miles south? Do you believe that it is more sensible to collect them all up and take them over 300 miles north to a new continent?
I do believe in saving drowning people.

Libya has in recent years descended into a lawless, chaotic state policed by armed militias, and Sea-Watch, a German charity, had already vowed never to return migrants to its shores.

"Forcibly taking rescued people back to a war-torn country, having them imprisoned and tortured, is a crime that we will never commit," the charity said in a statement last month.

The initially 53 people had been rescued on June 12 from a rubber boat in international waters. Later that day, in an unprecedented attempt to make Sea-Watch complicit in a grave human rights violation, the so-called Libyan Coast Guard had named Tripoli as a POS (supposed to mean: place of safety) and asked the ship to illegally transport the survivors back to Libya. Italian minister Matteo Salvini, who quite seriously demanded Sea-Watch to follow the Libyan instructions, even prompted a reaction from the EU commission stating: “All ships sailing under an EU flag are obliged to comply with international law when it comes to search and rescue, which includes the need to take rescued people to a safe place. The Commission has always said that these conditions do not currently exist in Libya.” However, the Commission did not give any indications as to where an actual safe place for disembarkation might be.