 Our next lecture has certain risks. It has more risks actually. It's called Plains and Chips and Saving Lives. It's how Soft and Hardware can actually play a key role in saving lives at sea and why Frontex doesn't like it. It's done by Trollafix, Nick and Ruben and what is following is actually a talk that's once again about a very serious moral and ethical dilemma. Since the death rate at the UPC border reached in historical record this year, in September one out of five people actually who left Libya on a fine wanky boat drowned in September. So the main reason for the increasing of this death rate is actually the crackdown on sea rescue operations by European authorities. Since no rescue coordination center clearly takes responsibility currently then the technical means of communication of course do play a key role in the efforts to coordinate rescues and in the future and that's what my friends here are going to explain you is that a civil society run maritime rescue coordination center could help to reduce the death of sea significantly. This talk focuses then on the Soft and Hardware components that are necessary to challenge European deadly border policy. So give them a warm applause. They will present us some potential solutions to fulfill this ambition. Thank you all. Yeah, thanks a lot for joining. It's great to have you all here because we need you all to solve this problem on the Mediterranean Sea we are going to talk about. My name is Ruben, that is Nick and this is Trollofix. We are going to talk about planes and ships and saving lives and especially how this comes together with people that are competent in IT technology that are competent in hardware technology and why this is so much needed currently on the Mediterranean Sea. Me personally I'm not a nerd at all so I have basically no idea about computers. I need my house nerds like Nick to help me encrypting my computer and my emails which is also pretty important in this time for Sea Rescue and I will tell you why shortly. So I'm basically giving you a short introduction into the situation on the Mediterranean Sea and afterwards those people who are much more competent in IT technology and hardware will talk about the solutions we need at sea for saving lives. So basically what is the problem? People are in distress at sea. This is a picture taken from our surveillance aircraft Moonbird. There's a rubber boat which is sinking and taking water. This is a situation we might currently have north of Alchoms which is a Libyan town at the so-called European border. I mean it's the Mediterranean Sea which is basically the border of the European Union. People start in Libya, try to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Why a boat? Because there's no safe and legal alternatives and so they are ending up in such kind of situations. If the talk is a bit chaotic at some points it might have to do with the fact that we are currently in operation with our ship and so there was not much time to prepare because still people are stranded on our boat but I will talk about that a bit later. So we have this situation with people in distress. So what would you normally expect that's going to happen? Well, if you are white and if you have a European passport and you get in distress some 100 meter out of a Yacht port in Germany that's going to happen. However, if you are not holding a European passport and if you are trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea and you get in distress maybe that's going to happen because basically the reaction of the European Union onto distress cases at sea looks like this. There's simply nothing. So what we were thinking about some years ago when the death toll on the Mediterranean Sea was on the rise, what can we do if people try to cross the Mediterranean Sea and risk their lives in totally un-sea-worthy old fishing cutters? So we had the idea that there was a solution to this and so we also bought an old and un-sea-worthy fishing cutter which we then turned into the Sea Watch One which was the first rescue ship coming from Germany to the Mediterranean Sea. However, we called it Sea Watch for a reason. We didn't call it Sea Rescue for example because in our view it's not the obligation of the civil society to solve the problems. European state have caused by closing down their border and by denying any legal alternative for people escaping war, terror or other things for example in Libya. So we thought what we still need to do is we need to go there, we need to look into the situation and we need to make sure that no one drowns. So that's basically what we did and we sent down the ship to the Mediterranean Sea and pretty fast we found a lot of people in distress there and we had to deal with it. So in the first moment we were pretty overwhelmed but then what happened and that was really amazing was that the civil society actually acted. So a lot of new NGOs popped up and sent ships to the Mediterranean Sea and that was something I was honestly impressed by because if we think about the European Union with all the means they have with ships, with planes, with a lot of money, whatever, we would have never estimated that it would be some Berlin hipsters in their mid-20s to send the most effective asset to defend the human rights on the Mediterranean Sea and to rescue lives. So but it was not only the Juventa, it was also for example Lifeline, Doctors Without Borders, there were the people from Sea Eye sending ships, so in the end we had a whole civil rescue fleet that was carrying out rescues on the Mediterranean Sea and that worked pretty well. So the civil rescue fleet was able to save thousands and thousands of lives on the Mediterranean Sea and that worked pretty well also because the coordination with the rescue coordination center in Rome worked pretty fine because during that time also on the European side at least some people thought well if people get in distress at sea we should probably rescue them. That's also a normal thing. So could you imagine someone could have something against rescuing lives at sea? Well probably you know the answer already. There is that guys. I mean that guy was pretty prominent in the media this year by plucking civil rescue ships but it also started a bit earlier. That guy, you might also know him, was the first one starting with the huge criminalization campaign against the civil sea rescue. So back in 2016, end of 2016, early 2017 there was a lot of rumours spreading about the NGOs on the Mediterranean Sea. What are they doing? Are they maybe colluding with the smugglers? And then there were some accusations that are pretty stupid. For example there was the accusation that was widely spread that we would give light signals to the Libyan shore. I mean we have nerds here so probably you are pretty good in mathematics and in geometry. So what do you think about the argument that there is the possibility of giving light signals to the Libyan shore if you are far out of territorial waters of Libya? So basically already from a geometry perspective it's not possible to give that kind of light signals. Still this accusation was widely spread. And of course that helped to let our donations drop and make our work much easier. Another accusation I want to shortly talk about is the accusation that we would not destroy the boats we find. Because there was the accusations if we find a rubber boat in distress we have to destroy it and then it cannot be used again by smugglers so there was the accusations we would not destroy them. I have to prove that we do so. So that's how it looks like if we destroy boats. So basically we have a lot of these accusations and what do you think how this contributes to the fact that we need a lot of nerds to help us in carrying out our mission. Why can nerds make our mission much safer? Well because if we are able to document what we are doing at sea, if we are able to document the positions we are on, if we can have a video of whatever happens at sea, then we can prove afterwards that these accusations are false. And that's why it's pretty important to have hardware technology on board our vessel. So that's one thing. However the story continued so these kind of accusations were very effective and so we ended up in a situation where the Juventa was the first ship to be confiscated. It's still confiscated, it was confiscated already in 2017, it's in Trapani now and it cannot do its job anymore. And we thought okay we still continue but then this year a lot of other ships were confiscated. We have the case of the lifeline that was very prominently in the media. The lifeline is still confiscated in Malta. So it became much more difficult for the civil NGOs and there was a moment where no civil rescue ship at all was left in the Mediterranean Sea. And of course this has effects. So what happened basically was the people were still coming because I mean there was this argument of a push factor, sorry a pull factor, so there was the argument by the European states that only because there is civil sea rescue the people are coming over the Mediterranean Sea and then they get rescued by the NGOs and then they get brought to Europe. However when there was no NGOs anymore still people were coming but there was just no one anymore to rescue them. So the effect of this fact we have seen in a pretty trastical way in the September of this year because before we had this number any idea what this number means. So this number is basically the death rate we had shortly before the NGOs were pulled out of the area. So it was 1 in 44. So if 1 in 44 who tries to cross the Mediterranean Sea via the central med would drown. When we had the last rescue ship the Aquarius stopping the operations because their flag was taken away in September the number raised to 1 in 5. So in September when there was no civil rescue ship at all we had 1 in 5 drowning who tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea and to better imagine what it means if 1 in 5 drowns you can just count in the rows here and you will recognize that it's a pretty horrible situation. And for this reason of course we tried to continue sea rescue. These pictures are taken last week because even though sometimes it's hard times at sea we managed to get our ships at least some of our ships back into operation and also we got back into operation our planes which we use for air surveillance. This picture is taken a year ago but the aircraft just took off half an hour ago from Lampedusa to search the eastern part of the central Mediterranean Sea. And that led to a situation where we are able to act again. So on Christmas or the weekend before Christmas the first rescue as in months since months carried out by civilian rescue operations took place. Those people are by the way still on the sea watch. But actually we are able to operate however and that's also why we had a lot of stress the last days. Coordination is pretty difficult. We now have a lot of groups involved in search and rescue. We have a difficult situation at sea so it's sometimes not easy to understand what is going on so communication is pretty important. So what can we do to not let this situation up end up into chaos like we can see on this picture. We need you because their hardware and software can play a key role to make our operations much more efficient. So we'll start with the hardware. I mean if you have a ship at sea hundreds of kilometers away from the shore then there's no way to actually reach this ship by simple mobile phone. So satellite communication is the first and very important part of hardware technology we have to use to make our operations much more efficient and how this works we will later see in a live call if it works out actually. And on the other hand another pretty important part of the hardware components is that we need actually cameras and we need voice recording systems to be able to prove what is going on at sea so that's why we need you guys because that's something I can't do. Then there's another thing. This is a IMRSAT-C technology. This is a basic satellite communication system to communicate with ships at sea. It's obligatory on all ships and this is also a way to reach other ships than our own vessels because it's not only civil rescue ships on the Mediterranean Sea it's also merchant vessels or other ships that are just around. We can contact through that and why this is important and why we need you to help us solve some problems with this old Microsoft DOS technology that is combined with that. That's also something Nick is going to talk about. And last but not least what we also want to establish and that's pretty important is a civil rescue coordination center because in former times when everything was running kind of okay the rescue coordination center in Rome if they are aware of a case of distress they would send the position to the civil rescue ship and they would coordinate everything so they would have their charts they would have all their screens and they would just deal with it and they would just only tell the civil rescue ships where to go and what to do. Since Salvini is in power this just doesn't happen and so we have to do it ourselves. That's why we think it's pretty important to have such a chart where we can plot all the distress cases where we can coordinate it ourselves. This is for two reasons one is to save human lives and one is also to monitor the human rights situation out at sea. So that's what Nick is going to tell you about what we need from the technical side. This comes into place again because this is very old technology and we need to combine it with new technology that looks like this so we can use it together and yeah that's basically the task we're going to talk about and so at this point I would like to hand over to get some more details about the technical solutions. Yeah hello I want to give you a short introduction how it's like to be this ship system administrator. I will spend two weeks in September on the on the lifeline and basically refurbished the whole ship's network. So a short introduction again the ship was built in 1968 as Cloupier and was built by the 40 Department of Agriculture and Fisheries of Scotland and in 2015 it was bought by Seawatch and then in 2017 it was bought by Mission Lifeline and is since operated by Lifeline. Well and as you can imagine in the last 50 years a lot of mechanics engineers and technicians botched around the ship work, repaired stuff and upgraded it so in some parts this feels like maintaining a legacy software project. The power supply there are two generators on the ship so in general the stability and availability of the power is not as reliable as on land so therefore all devices which are essential for navigation and communication are better rebuffered. Now I want to shortly cover devices sensors and data providers you will find on board so for navigation we have a gyro compass which is basically a compass which gives the orientation on the and gyro which gives the orientation of the ship in the waves because it's always changes of course. Then we have GPS receivers so this is the global positioning system so we always need to find our current position and we also have AIS transmitters and receivers. AIS is the AIS is the automatic information system so this is basically a transmitter which sends out the ship's name, the current position and the course and this is also for collision avoidance. Furthermore we have weather data which is fetched online and for communication we have standard radios and iridium, a visa uplink and LTE but I will cover that later and many of these devices need to be interconnected so the autopilot for example needs access to the compass data of course and to the gyro and GPS and the AIS. Some of the radios need AIS and so basically we have lots of devices on board and a huge network and everything is connected with various NMEA 0183 buses which is essentially RS 422 or NMEA 2000 which is essentially a canvas so we have multiple of these in the ship to interconnect all the devices we find on the bridge. So furthermore there's also an office on the ship so there are printers, white phones, a Wi-Fi network, Ethernet network and we have lots of laptops with Linux. Furthermore there's also there are IP cameras as Ruhm already told and audio recording setup and network storage because you might later need to prove what we did so we need to record all our positions and all the cameras, what the cameras recorded from deck and around the ship. So all of the computers on the lifeline are now provisioned with Ansible which is a fast replacement in emergency situations e.g. for example if the ship's the bridge computer with the navigation crashes or just falls down due to heavy waves so we can grab the media team's computer and make it a bridge computer within minutes. So furthermore Ansible has the great advantage that we sort of have a documentation and for a replacement cruise which happens every two weeks it's comprehensible how the computers are set up. Also documentation is essential. If you build something without documenting it it's virtually non-existent. Especially on a ship this can be very dangerous and for example in life threatening situation if you need a handbook of a broken device and you have no power and no internet connection this can be really dangerous. So you need to document everything. Here we see the storage compartment for the documentation which is the whole row of folders up there and so everything is ordered by letter and number and so on so it's easy to access everything because everything is on board. Also a labor printer is very helpful if you have a bunch of cables as you saw in the previous picture it's rather annoying to find out which cable belongs to which. And as there is no strength or storage compartment but rather many small spaces and under seat benches and beds and cupboards you need to be very organized to put everything in its spot at all times or you will spend most of your time searching for your tools and materials which is rather annoying to go up and down the small steps on the ship all day long. And also it's rather inconvenient if you wake up the ship's engineer because you need to access the compartment below his bed just to find out that the tool you are looking for was not there anymore because you put it somewhere else. So to give you an imagination I'll show you a short video hopefully. Okay. So yeah well I started also taking videos for documentation. To show the locations of these compartments because it's not really convenient to take pictures of write it down because then I can give the replacement cruise a virtual tour of the ship without being on the ship myself and also the others don't need to be on the ship and I can show them around and then they can immediately ask questions. So I took another video. The whole thing here with the switch, as I said, is currently still defective. Exactly. After that, the three minutes need to be heated up and then you can start here with the STBI Standby TX switch and then the antenna starts turning up. The opposite of this device is then over here. This is the remote processing unit that is basically connected here with a DVI cable and various other items. Here this thick cable that goes out here that is also what leads up to the mast. Similar to all these radio devices and so on. And also the two of them in front. Channel 12 is the harbour radio channel 16, the radio channel. Also these antennas lead to the mast and that's why these cable trees go off. Here it disappears in. All that is up here in this wood coating that is removable leads here to the devices. So there is also the laptop that, for example, is here. Yeah, okay. That's it. That's it for that. So basically I was, as the video is very recorded in German, I'm shortly going to explain what I told. Basically I showed the radios and the radar system in the bridge, which was located there. And also basically in the rest of the video, I would show how the cables go through the ship to which positions. And lastly, I want to quickly introduce a project Daniel made. Yeah, we've had some problems that the ship has multiple uplinks as already explained and we always wanted to select the currently best uplink. There are commercial solutions for this and there's a talk about why we didn't use it. It's called Das Boot 4.0 by Stefan Gehling and it was held at the MRM CDs this year and it's available via media CC CDE. So feel free to have a look at it. So we have three uplinks. The first one is LTE. Every one of you has in his phone or her phone. So it's very fast but it has limited traffic and it's only available in ports or close to the islands. Then we have Visaat, which is satellite base. It has a flat rate, it's lower than LTE and is available on C most of the times but it needs a dish and this dish always needs to be aligned with the satellite. So sometimes there are obstacles in the way. For example, the ship's pole and then we have to have no fix. And also in heavy sea sometimes we lose the link. And then we have Iridium, which is also satellite base but doesn't need a dish but just a regular antenna. This works mostly all the time but it's super expensive, like for a phone call three euros per minute and 16 euros per megabyte. So we use this. No. We build a set up, which basically is an APU board with an LTE modem which is shown here and it runs open WRT, an embedded Linux system for a Linux operating system for embedded devices. And we have two VPN endpoints in two different locations on land running open WRT as well. And we set up wire guard tunnels between all devices and then the uplink to be used is determined with OLSR, which is a link state routing protocol and maybe known to you from Fryphone because they also use to use it. So basically if Visaat or LTE are available, always the best link will be used and provided. And if LTE and Visaat are gone and will automatically drop to Iridium but due to limited bandwidth and the overhead, we don't use the wire guard tunnels then anymore. But actually the set up worked very well for the last months and the uplink availability also compared to the previous installs which also increased. Yeah. Hi, I'm Nick. Yeah. As I said, I'm working with SeaWatch. We already had to talk like two years ago about developing the search and rescue application, which was basically like an application to provide C2C communication organization. That means we basically had the problem that at this time we're like a lot of NGOs working in this area. And yeah, we basically wrote like a geographical information system to coordinate between all those ships and to basically track our ships. What we are like, yeah, the problem we're having at this moment is that we have still some assets in the rescue zone, but we don't have like a MRCC, that means like a rescue coordination center, which is coordinating those cases. So what we are basically thinking is all the assets that are MRCC, like a state-run MRCC already has, are already available. That means there are NGOs which are caring about emergency call telephone lines. So that means if people start from Libya right now, they are likely not called the Italian MRCC, so the Italian Rescue Coordination Center anymore, because it's super likely that they will pass on this information to the Libyans. So it's like more likely that, yeah, like voluntarily NGOs are called and they are like trying to manage those cases without human rights violations. That means they inform those ships which will, yeah, for example, not the Libyan Coast Guard, etc. So we also have like the assets already in place. That means as a maritime coordination center has the Coast Guard, etc., we already have ships which are like able to rescue. And last but not least, the Rescue Coordination Centers also provide like all the forensic stuff and also are like responsible for taking all the evidence. That's what we're doing right now for our ships. That means like with this application we're having running right now, we can track our ships all the time. That means, like for example, we had one incident where, yeah, like there was a rescue of the Libyan Coast Guard where a seawatch was also involved, where like more than, yeah, around about 30 people died. And the first accusation of the Libyan Coast Guard was that we were in that territory water. So it was like quite a fast thing to prove with our data, like there's also like more neutral data on it, but we could like see super fast and with that improved super fast and with that, that we were like never in the territory waters in this incident. So this kind of stuff is super important also to then give it away to other organizations, for example, Forensic Architecture, who then work with this data to, yeah, display it nicely and also pass it on to possible, yeah, law enforcement authorities, which deal with it. So what we're doing right now or what we're planning right now is that we want to take this application and make it more to a land sea organization, software and that's really important. We had the cases that there were boats in distress, especially like in the last month. And because of the situation that Italy is not feeling responsible anymore for those ships, we had the situation that commercial vessels, that means tankers and so on, had to rescue those people and they were, yeah, in the situation that they couldn't really get rid of the people as fast or like, yeah, so, yeah, how to describe it, they weren't allowed to go into Italy, which means that for example the SARS-5-1 ship was forced to have around about 80 migrants, I guess, for two weeks on board without like really being prepared for it while our ships were blocked in Malta. So what's happening right now, if migrants are in distress, that it's super likely that those ships will not rescue them. So we already also had the reports from migrants who said that they were seeing ships when they were in distress and they just passed by it. It's not clear if they saw them or not, but yeah, it's happening at this moment. So what we are trying to do is, as said, there's AIS, which is basically publicly available. So that means everybody can get this data and what we want to do is, now we want to have a database of every ship which is passing through this area. So now we also want to take commercial vessels into our application so that we can, if there's any incident, can afterwards see which ships were closed by and even if we have reports what the ship looked like, etc., we can maybe find out what ship it were and then look if we can provide information to law enforcement authorities to then maybe get forward with it. So that's the basic idea. So now can you go to the call? Yeah. So as you have seen now, what why we need this technique for, now we want to have a little practice test and we are all curious if it's going to happen. So what we are doing now is to call our ship which is currently stranded at sea with 32 people rescued already six days ago. Yeah, and it's pretty important because as you can imagine there's now negotiations ongoing, international negotiations, we are talking with governments, we are talking with cities, whether they take the people and then we have to be constantly in contact with the ship to find a solution for these people and that's why we need this technique and now we're going to see if it works out. Yeah, hello. Hello. Hi. Hello from SeaWatch3. Hi from the Chaos Communication Congress. How is the situation on board? Hello. So we are now 67 ish miles out of Malta. Hello. Yeah. On the 22nd of December, shit, just this week. Yeah, just today. We rescued 32 people at the stress at sea. We can hear you. And we have been drifting and moving in international waters since. Cool. So this is the people who survived inhumane treatment abuse. Can you see the audience? Can you see the audience? Maybe we can give to the audience. We can see the screen. All right. So normally you should see the audience here listening to you guys. However, if you can't see them, I can see them and I can refer. So is there any questions you guys want to ask to the ship? Then it's your opportunity now. Yeah, that's a question. Hi. I was wondering when are you planning to go to a dock somewhere? Like how does that work right now in the current situation? Because you have people on board, right? So you need to get them on to land, I'm assuming. So I just repeat the question because I don't know if it went. So we got the question was when are we going to dock? Yes. And how does it work? I hope you can hear me now. I have a big delay here. Our plan was to dock quite a while ago after we rescued the 32 people from the boat in distress on the 22nd. Actually, we went back on the 23rd towards north. But the thing is that no European state, especially not Martin, Italy, who are the closest ports of safety would grant us permission to go into port. So right now we are just waiting for any opportunity to go to a port of safety that is in vicinity of our current position. Someone else's question. Okay. Any more questions to the ship right now? So you're looking for a place right now, who are the parties you are talking to? Are you talking, are people on land talking to governments or are you guys on the ship directly communicating to ports? Who is talking to who for this? Yes. So basically the question was whether the ship is talking to us. I think at the moment that was the delay. I'm sorry for that. Now we have a huge delay here. So I think a lot of people are talking to a lot of people at the moment. Our head of mission is constantly in contact with the back of this, but also worth the... If someone has a question, raise your hand. There you already can see how difficult it is to get this kind of connection established. And that's also why we need you, because anything that improves this situation, that we have to delay, that we don't get the picture, that's what we need you for. And then we have the people talking to governments, driving speedboats to rescue people out of the maritime distress. That's all we can solve. But this, what is happening here right now, that's what you have to solve. Maybe there are commissions as well for this group here. Okay, we have two mics as well. Raise your hands. I can run. What was what happened with the medical emergency right now on the boat? Were they allowed to dock then? Or is it just with the docks on board? There is a medical emergency. We normally ask the closest MRCC that is able to provide a medical evacuation that is normally carried out either by a speedboat or by a helicopter. This happened, for example, last Friday when there was a medical emergency on the open arms, which is the ship from our partner organization Proactiva. There was a baby that was in severe distress and so Malta in the end sent a helicopter to fly the baby and the mother to Malta. However, it took quite some time and in the first place there was no authorization for even a medical evacuation. So even that becomes pretty difficult in these times now. Someone else's question. There are microphones, right? One and two. I can of course run around all the time. It's really good for my condition after last long night. So my question is what do you do when you aren't allowed to like go to a port and when there's are more people in I mean in danger on the sea? So is there a limit? I mean there will be a limit on people you can take on the board, but do you have a second boat where you pass the people on the sea? Because I mean if you can't like get them on the land that's a pretty good question. I mean that's what we are trying to solve at the moment and we don't really have an answer to this because normally the law of the sea is pretty clear that people have to be brought to a place of safety as soon as possible after a rescue. However currently as you see we are hanging around at sea skyping with the chaos communication congress but there is no solution where to disembark the people and also at the same time we have information about three boats in distress right at this very moment and there's our partner organization CI which carried out a rescue today morning. So yeah we are trying to coordinate with them and with them so the ship is back. Great. Yeah. Hi so I'm not entirely up to date about the situation of the singular european countries. The last thing which comes into my mind was that there was support from the Spanish government did that change in the past few weeks and months or are they still supporting NGOs like yours? Do you want to go on the ship? What did Spain say? So we for now no there is there was another rescue by open arms the organization for active open arms over 300 people were rescued and this is the ship that carries a Spanish flag so they headed naturally for Spain. Our flag is that of the Netherlands so our case is different. As we said that this is still ongoing the whole negotiation of what happens when we get our flag country I say for provided by them and then we can go there. So in this case this is Netherlands. And I think what is what is very important to say here is that Spain itself hasn't been very supportive. I mean Spain has its own rescue going on at the Strait of Gibraltar but there have been a couple of cities in Spain especially Barcelona where our partners from Proactiva Open Arms are based also who have been very supportive and so the Spanish government has bowed also I think to the pressure of the Spanish civil society who like really because Proactiva is pretty big there. So the Spanish government has bowed a couple of times but they wouldn't do this for anyone and they didn't do it for us even if we could have just handed over these 30 people we have on board to the through our Spanish partners at Open Arms and they could have taken them. I have another question. So it sounds like there's no real solution and you have to negotiate this on a case-by-case basis. Is that actually like how it is? That's how it is actually unfortunately. Number two question for people on board. First of all I really do hope the 30 people on board are okay and they get sort of somewhere to land safely. I'm curious about these negotiations. What kind of leverage can you apply to I suppose it's mostly shame governments into letting you dock. How do these negotiations work? I mean there's beside of shaming the German Interior Minister which we normally do on Twitter. There is the law of the sea and the law of the sea is pretty clear and we are currently living in a situation where basic rights abandoned by the European states which makes it pretty difficult but at the same time this law basis is still in place. So what we also try to do is to remember them about international conventions they have signed which basically state that there needs to be a port of safety as soon as possible and there is actually obligations for states also to make that happen. So that's also part of the negotiations. However as you said there is not much left as leverage and then to publicly shame them for just abandoning basic human rights at sea. But maybe in addition to that what we have seen and what was a lot of leverage was the seabrook movement. We have seen in Germany because when we had at the first of this kind of standoffs with the lifelines stranded at sea with more than 200 people in front of Malta. We thought okay if the governments are not reacting if Sehofer just doesn't do his job we will do it more from a grassroots way. So we talked to a lot of cities we talked to several federal states and for example Berlin then said well yes we would welcome them and Berlin was the first federal state to do it and many others followed so Hamburg Bremen, Schleswig-Holstein, Thüringen, Brandenburg everyone all of a sudden said okay we would take some of those people and exactly the same thing is happening right now so we had quite some negotiations ongoing the last two days with German federal states and right now some of them again Berlin in the first place said that they would welcome these people and that even forced at the German Interior Ministry to make a very embarrassing tweet where they said that actually they are open for a solution but only if it's happening on European level because Germany already had taken I think 115 people that were rescued at sea so big applause to Germany the biggest and most rich country on the continent has managed to take 115 people not this month this year not this month not this week this year the whole year so yeah pretty embarrassing tweet by the Interior Minister and we now try to pressure him a bit more by also involving other European states and by trying to put pressure to at least take the 32 people where we think that should be possible By the way we have this expensive line open there I suggest to communicate then okay hi my name is Friedrich Beckmann I'm from Seebrücke Augsburg we met with Seebrücke Augsburg the CSU Fraktion from Augsburg last week and we will meet Oberbürgermeister Griebel on 11th of February and we wanted to or what we are doing is we explain the idea that the city of Augsburg will ask the Ministry of Interior in Bavaria to say we are ready and we are welcoming people in distress which are on boats such that they can leave the boat and they could you could enter Malta Haber and they will just fly over based on paragraph 23 so on humanitarian reasons and do you think that would help if Augsburg would say yes that's a bright idea we are ready to take a number of people like 100 500 whatever um so that you can leave actually the the ships ships oh sorry uh could you and like as Ruben already said the Seebrücke movement and the whole the whole thing of Solidarity Cities is pretty much our our biggest hope it's and I think this also goes together with the civil MRCC that um the only the only solution that can be provided or that looks like promising here is that the civil society takes over because the states are not gonna we've seen this for like almost four years now out here that the states are just going out of the zone are not doing the rescues are not taking the people are actually hindering rescue operations so the only um the only promising solution is that the civil society really steps in and there we need like a lot of creative heads to um to to find ways to operate to keep us operative and to operate a distribution um like the Seebrücke movement did without and and parallel to the to the state authorities okay so um I just heard we are a bit over time so um I would like to thank a lot to the ship I hope you're doing well um I think we're on the ship all a bit tired and exhausted but uh and we would love to be actually on the congress but uh we're doing very well and also our guests are we have a we have a big deck that looks any bit like a tea house at the congress uh there is a lot of music and conversation and singing and dancing and kind of nice things going on uh so although we are a such a rescue ship we're not actually equipped for staying for having guests for longer time on board uh we tried to make best of the situation it's been seven days we have wonderful people on board that's who have been through horrible unimaginable things and we still managed to somehow dance together so we're tired and it's hard but it's also cool we just learned there's one more question yeah we can take one more question if the counter is going probably we're there number one please shoot okay so uh first thank you for the work you do and my question is practicality set aside would your ships theoretically be able to leave the Mediterranean and enter non-mediterranean european ports if there would be an opening that is mainly a political question i mean uh the thing is non-mediterranean you did ask non-mediterranean ports of european countries or of other countries than european countries or both yeah for example we well we could do this and there has been a discussion and actually malta told us to go to russia or some that there has been a couple of people saying to us you've you've got a dutch flag so go to russia we could do this yes but it would take ages it would take up to two weeks to go from here to Rotterdam and another two weeks to go back so it would keep us out of this ison farm longer than we want to and secondly we would have to go through the bay of bisque which is now in winter quite a rough place to be on the seas and it would not be very nice towards our guests who are on our off deck outside in a tent in a huge tent actually to go on the bay of bisque i mean the the mediterranean is treacherous enough every now and then going in the worst waters like the atlantic at this time of the year is would just be irresponsible and yeah yeah and besides staying out of sarzone and what christ mentioned the rough weather are the reasons there is also high cost of doing such a thing be very costly to do that so there are many many many reasons why we also the law says you have to go to the next to the closest port of safety and not to some port on the other end of the world or on the other end of the continent yeah golfer biskaya wouldn't advise to do currently actually my experience i know it had guys i think we're gonna close the session here because their counter was going running and it costs a lot of money of course i would love to thank you there on the on board and thanks here to troller flex thank you all thanks to troller fix nick and robin and thanks to the walk force setting up the video link