 In unserem vorherigen Talk haben wir schon ein bisschen Einblick erhalten, was denn so an Technologie da ist. So in the talk before, we heard about the technology, which is available to protect our borders, and now we are going to hear, talk about how the state is for the refugees and for the people who are helping the refugees in the Mediterranean. So please welcome our speakers. Welcome to our presentation about the European outer borders. We want to give an overview about the routes refugees are taking to Europe and about what happened this year regarding this. We are talking about the policies regarding the frontiers and Nico and myself, we have been in the Mediterranean helping the refugees there and we are going to talk about our experience. We are going to talk about the borders at sea and these borders at the sea and our work is just a small part about the whole situation. There is a lot of other work which is done by other organizations and which is just as important and we encourage you to inform yourself about all the other work which is going on, even though media is focusing on the borders at sea a lot. So thank you for the introduction. We have brought you a map and when we are talking about the Mediterranean, which lines for refuge are there, there are mainly three routes. One is very much to the west from Morocco to Spain, around the second important route is to the central Mediterranean from Libya in direction to Italy and the third one is the eastern one from Turkey, from the Turkish mainland to the Greek islands. So I want to make clear that we made this sharp distinction, but there is no real huge distinction between them and over time the routes change a lot regarding how many people are taking which routes and also where exactly it is geographically. Also historically we can say fleeing from over the Mediterranean, that's not a new phenomenon. We are seeing this since the 90s, in the beginning of the 90s, mainly in western Africa, one moment, in the beginning of the 90s. It was mainly in West Africa to the Canary Islands and in the beginning of the zero years, it's more towards the center of the Mediterranean, excuse me, so it's more going towards the central Mediterranean and we need to be clear, excuse me, I need to take a seat for a moment. Okay, I'm going to continue with my part, which is also very interesting. And then we are going back to Nico once he's feeling better. I want to talk about the Libyan Coast Guard, which we can see on this picture. So-called Libyan Coast Guards is a militia, which is founded mainly by Europe, by Italy, to violate human rights. An explanation. There is a war going on in Libya. There is no proper government in Libya. And the EU is saying that the official government has only limited influence about the military and the militia, which is active in Libya. So these Coast Guards are part of this militia, but there is also a lot of infighting going on. They give themselves the name Libyan Coast Guard as an umbrella term, and they are funded by the Italian government to save lives. But in reality, the Libyan Coast Guard is forcing the humans onto their boats, leaving people dying on the Mediterranean, on the sea, if they don't want to go back to Libya. And there have been documented cases where the Libyan Coast Guard was not willing to rescue refugees dying in the Mediterranean. Just as well we have heard reports from refugees jumping back into the sea to not be brought back to Libya. At the same time the Libyan Coast Guard is fighting other organizations trying to save refugees. So there is a civil war going on in Libya, leads to the fact that there is no safe harbours in Libya, where people in need can be brought back to from international waters. Human Rights Watchers have described the places in Libya very badly. There are people being beaten and raped and so on. And this practice is being enforced. This year the Italian government has renewed a pact from Italy, where Italy is supporting Libya, saying they want to make Libya a safe country for refugees, which obviously is horrible and against every human right. Here a small presentation, you can see in the central Mediterranean, compared 2017 to 2018, through this installment of the so called Libyan Coast Guard, the people arriving have been gone down a lot. This is not the case because there is a lot of people trying to get there, but because a lot of people are being caught in international waters and are transported back illegally to Libya. 2.242 humans have died in the Mediterranean within this year. This number alone is saying a lot about the politics regarding the European outer borders. None of these people should have been died. One question. Why are people fleeing by boat to Europe? There is a simple answer. For most of them, there is no other option for escape towards Europe. This way is very expensive. Officially they would need official documentations, official certificates, which aren't available because there is wars going on and so on. If you apply for a visa, it takes a lot of time. It's impossible to wait for all this time and also it is again very expensive for people coming from a country where there is war or who are in danger of violence. The only way to get to a safe country is the so-called illegal way of escape. You are crossing a border without a legal or acknowledged passport. In Syria everyone would have a right to asylum. Once you have reached the European mainland or are in European waters, but in reality the time to get an official asylum takes a long time. They are living in uncertainty. They basically can't develop their independent life. They aren't able to decide independently where they want to live during this time period. It's basically impossible to work on your traumas. Traumata are being reinforced by their surroundings, in which they are kind of imprisoned. Arriving in the European mainland and getting asylum doesn't mean safety. There is a lot of cases where the right to asylum is not recognized. And people are being deported without really being registered. Here you see a picture of the life jacket graveyard. Each of these life vests has been worn by one person crossing the Mediterranean. In the European Parliament there is no outcry when people are dying. Because those people are no longer a hassle for Europe, so they don't have to be registered. In Europe it's fine if these people are dying, because otherwise they would stop it. Through the public demand it becomes normal and even as a wanted situation that the people fleeing from war, from violence are denied human rights. This is not a natural disaster. This is human made. And it's the political thought this way. It's important why a person flees. Violence, war, hunger or no perspectives. Every human has a right to find security and future. We go back. He'll try a continuing where he stopped. In the beginning of the 90's the escapes over the Mediterranean started. In the start of the 90's this went into the middle of the Mediterranean where certain geopolitical factors influenced this. For example the fall of Gaddafi and the destabilization of Libya which made this possible as well as the Syrian civil war where people are using the eastern route but also political alliances like the EU-Turkey deal which is trying to block the eastern Mediterranean route. To come back to the central Mediterranean the main part of the tragedy has happened here. And the year 2013 it's very extraordinary. There were a lot of ship disasters. It's about that until October 2013 where two ship disasters came right after the other on the end of Lampedusa. Over 500 people died. That was the last waking call which made Italy send out a seawatch mission. We knew that under Mare Nostrum with Italian military ships and Coast Guard ships with the goal of saving people. This mission was there until October 2014 was pretty successful. Saved a lot of people. The death rate shrank in this time but after this one year Italy was still doing this alone. No other European country cooperated financially more by taking in the refugees. For this reasons Italy stopped this mission in 2014 and there was a huge gap left behind because people were still coming to see Coast Guard ships. This gap was closed by a civilian seawatch organization. The idea was if states can do this to save people. If the rich Europe can do this we as a civil society have to do it ourselves and we can't let people die before our continent. The civil seawatch starting 2015 was very turbulent in the last years with highs and lows. We'll try to give a view back on the year 2018. There were news here and there but what was left at the end of the year noticed myself while I'm really following this topic. When looking back I noticed that a lot of these points were already gone from my memory because just so many. Looking forward we could also see in August of 2017 Italy seized the Juventa, a saving ship and they took the first civilian Coast Guard ships out of service. In March 2018 the open arms were seized in Italy and luckily these could get free after one month. The thing we can see in the whole year is in June the Aquarius saved together with other ships 600 people and everyone went on board of Aquarius and they would just drive to a harbor and bring the people to the land but this had didn't happen. There was no harbor assigned to them Aquarius was on the Mediterranean for three days not knowing where to go and afterwards Spain said they would take in these people so the Aquarius and two other ships a European military ship and an Italian Coast Guard ship which carried the people they drove for five days in Spain to bring these people on land in Valencia at the same time the Italian Coast Guard ship Decotti had a similar case they saved people and as an Italian Coast Guard ship they didn't get a harbor in Italy which was due to the big political pressure in Italy and other places and they were on the sea for days as well the end of this was in the end of June when the lifeline which saved 150 people was also stranded at sea for a week on the Mediterranean which is far smaller ship than the other two until European countries were okay with taking in people and the ship was allowed to land in Malta but it was seized at once and the captain was confronted with criminal charges and the ship is still in Malta and is not allowed to drive out this principle came up again a few days later in the beginning of July when the sea watch wanted to drive out for the saving mission and they were not allowed as well this principle of not letting ships drive out was a European strategy and tactics the tactic that you don't want that ships are there to save people so you want even less to have ships that can document people dying and to kill off this witnessing thing Malta grounded the civilian observation plane seabird so they weren't able to document what the Libyan coastguard what people in danger experienced in reaction to that there was a big answer of the civil society which said we can look at this much longer they started the sea bridge movement which got pretty big had a big demonstration at the 7th of July in Berlin the humans protested for sea watch and secure harbors in the beginning of August we had a new low point when another ship, an Italian ship was rescuing people from the Mediterranean and brought them right back to Libya all in all we have seen the situation quite a lot why is this new? because it's a European ship which brought the people back to Libya there was a similar case in 2009 where people were rescued and brought back by Libyan boats the people went to court about this in the European court and there was they agreed that it is inhuman to bring people back to Libya into a civil war so now this is incredible that people ships from European countries from Italy bring people back to Libya as a tactic to bring a ship to not allow ships to go out Europe has also decided for another way to go so Gibralte wanted to remove the flag from a ship which was at sea the official reason was the reason given was that the ship was registered as a survey vessel but we are seeing that it is doing search and rescue missions interestingly there isn't even a category where you could register a ship as a rescue vessel so additionally we have to say that for all the years the ship was registered in Gibralte there were no other issues which would allow to remove the flag from the ship the Italian ship which we have mentioned before so again was in the end of August when there were 190 people on board and they were in Haber in Catania and they weren't allowed to leave the people go to the land which resulted in Italy bringing to court stuff against in a minister of Italy for in jailing people and then he gave a speech in response where he basically courted Mussolini so after 10 years on board the people were finally allowed to leave the ship to go on land and get medical help various flags was removed and because they are still rescue missions which need to be done they tried to get a new flag and they finally got it in September and went back to a rescue mission with a flag from Panama and one week later the flag was again removed by Panama because of the pressure by Italy towards Panama Italy was saying if you don't remove the flag from the Aquarius we are not going to accept ships from Panama in our harbors Panama was under a lot of pressure so they decided to remove the flag in the meantime there was some good news so CW3 was allowed to leave Malta and is again on a mission since the end of November and send some more bad news so Mediterranean the organization operating the Aquarius announced that they will stop doing rescue missions after 2000 people saved and after years of work because they are no longer capable of finding a flag to go out under to find a country giving out their flag to do the rescue missions in other news this year 75 people were rescued by a transport ship and were brought back to Libya so people refused to go off board and after one week on board the military removed them by force additionally another ship from a place, a European country Libya sorry I didn't catch this the military operation in the meantime cancelled their rescue missions because they also didn't get any harbours where they could go into and a German newspaper a quality newspaper wanted to discuss whether rescue missions in the Mediterranean should be allowed and the internet gave an adequate response to this by saying that maybe the voluntary firefighter shouldn't save people as well so just right now the sea watch 3 has 33 people on board and they have saved them a couple days ago and they again didn't get a safe harbour to go to während die Staaten Europa versucht die Schiffe selber außen vorzuhalten while the European states tried to criminalise the immigrants and now the refugees and there is another way they want to go and now they are targeting the helpers and the people who are showing solidarity and don't look away there is a crew of the inventor a ship which has been kept debated since middle of 2017 so now we know that people are being charged because they helped people illegally immigrate into Italy and that's a hard charge like a very big charge in Italy there is a lot of money and up to 5 years in prison we can draw parallels to Cup An Amur a ship in 2004 which rescued refugees in the Mediterranean and brought them to Italy back in that day the captain and other crew were arrested and were charged oh no they weren't charged they were being accused but the ship needed to be sold and there were hundreds of thousands of euros for the process costs which they needed to pay but in the end they could go free so this is the situation we are in right now, there are people at court because they have saved people from drowning excuse me this criminalisation is not only about ships but also about ships which are organisations trying to help in the eastern Mediterranean route there is an NGO on Lesbos which are at court because again charges of illegal immigrations and espionage and again very hard accusations and a report by Human Rights Watch has been made this help for illegal immigration which they are being accused of has happened on days where the people being accused weren't even in the country so it's clearly a political process which is happening now so about Lesbos and Turkey where we are being active in the end of 2015 beginning of 2016 over half a million humans reached Europe through Lesbos and in response the European Union reacted in March 2016 there was a deal between Europe and Turkey where they closed the border everyone crossing the border after the state which reached Greece still have very tough processes for their asylum is being decided so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so 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