“[A]s many as 500 are missing,” Nicolaos Spanoudakis, a Greek police inspector, told the Guardian. “Women and children, it seems, were in the hold.” The Greek coast guard said Thursday that it had arrested nine men of Egyptian decent in connection to the disaster.
As hopes of finding missing people faded — and reports and photos began to reveal conditions on board the boat — Greek authorities have come under fire from rights groups, legal experts and the United Nations for not doing more to prevent the probable drowning of hundreds of people. Critics lambasted the European Union for asylum policies they say force desperate people to risk their lives to make perilous sea journeys to Europe.
The sea rescue nonprofit Alarm Phone said it had received distress alerts Tuesday from people on board who reported the ship held some 750 passengers — an estimate shared by the International Organization for Migration, which said the figure likely included at least 40 children, the Associated Press reported.
The shipwreck was the largest on record off the Greek coast, and “one of the most devastating tragedies in the Mediterranean in a decade,” the IOM said in a tweet Thursday.
Greek authorities rescued 104 people in an operation launched Wednesday. Rescue efforts continued Thursday, with helicopters and Coast Guard ships scouring the waters around 50 miles southwest of Pylos. But no more survivors, or bodies, had been found by midafternoon local time on Thursday, according to the coast guard.
Given the site of the wreck, close to the deepest point in the Mediterranean, “it seems highly unlikely to find something now,” said Lefteris Papagiannakis, director of the Greek Council for Refugees, a rights group.
Greece declared three days of mourning, and campaigning for the country’s general election on June 25 was suspended. Critics urged the country, and Europe broadly, to make changes to its approach to Mediterranean migration.
“This situation reinforces the urgent need for integrated and coordinated action by States to save lives at sea and reduce dangerous journeys, by strengthening safe and regular migration routes,” Gianluca Rocco, head of the International Organization for Migration’s mission in Greece, said in a news release.
The prosecutor of Greece’s supreme court, Isidoros Dogiakos, ordered a probe into the shipwreck, with the goal of holding “persons involved” criminally responsible, Greek media outlets reported.
The coast guard and a sea rescue NGO presented divergent accounts of events leading up to the boat’s sinking, including whether those on board had requested help — spurring debate about whether Greek authorities should have intervened sooner. Greek authorities reported hearing repeatedly from people aboard that they wanted to continue on to Italy. Alarm Phone reported receiving multiple distress calls.
International maritime law establishes search and rescue areas that extend outward from national waters, in which the nearest coastal country is obligated to respond to incidents that could threaten human life, said Maria Gavouneli, president of Greece National Commission for Human Rights. The ship sank in Greece’s area.
But if people on the boat told them to go away, “by law, they couldn’t very much do anything else from that point in time,” Gavouneli said. “This is a close call.”
Some experts argue that extreme overcrowding on the boat, clearly visible in images released by the Greek coast guard, made clear that the vessel was not seaworthy.
“This boat was unseaworthy & no matter what some people on board may have said, the notion of distress cannot be discussed,” Vincent Cochetel, U.N. high commissioner for refugees special envoy for the Western and Central Mediterranean, said in a tweet.
Shipwreck off the Greek coast. This boat was unseaworthy & no matter what some people on board may have said, the notion of distress cannot be discussed. A robust & predictable SAR regime led by States is needed in the Central Med if we want to avoid such tragedies to repeat. pic.twitter.com/SLrlY2wgNH
— vincent cochetel (@cochetel) June 14, 2023
Alarm Phone suggested that some migrants might have preferred to try their luck at reaching Italy due to the poor reputation of the Greek coast guard, which has faced increased criticism in recent weeks for allegedly illegally deporting a group of migrants from a Greek island to Turkey.
“People on the move know that thousands have been shot at, beaten, and abandoned at sea by these Greek forces,” the group said in a news release Wednesday.
UNHCR has advocated for a broad, precautionary interpretation of distress, “notably where boats carrying asylum seekers and migrants are unseaworthy, uncrewed, improperly equipped or overcrowded.”
Greece has been penalized for intervening before, though, so decisions on rescuing migrant boats are particularly sensitive, Gavouneli said. Last year, the European Court of Human Rights fined Greece for a pushback operation in 2014 that caused a migrant boat to sink off the coast of the Greek island of Farmakonisi, killing 11 migrants, including young children.
Survivors of the wreck are traumatized and desperate for news of missing friends and relatives, Erasmia Roumana, head of a U.N. refugee agency delegation, told the AP. Most were men from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories, a spokesperson for the Greek coast guard said Wednesday. No women are known to have survived.
As the Greek probe gets underway, authorities plan to transfer survivors, recovering in hospitals or waiting in a storage hangar in the southern port of Kalamata, to the Malakasa refugee camp, Greek media outlets reported. Authorities would evaluate asylum claims and send home any survivors deemed ineligible, said Daniel Esdras, Greece’s interim migration minister, the Guardian reported.
Wednesday’s shipwreck is part of a harrowing trend: The IOM’s Missing Migrants program has recorded nearly 27,000 deaths in the Mediterranean since 2014. More than 2,700 people died on sea routes from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe, mainly in the Mediterranean, last year, according to U.N. figures.
Under E.U. immigration laws, there are few or no legal migration pathways for people from many countries in the Global South. And for people fleeing wars, persecution or natural disasters must attempt long, treacherous journeys across the sea or overland through the Balkans to seek asylum in Europe.
The question of responsibility for rescuing migrant boats in distress has become fraught, since E.U. policy requires refugees to apply for asylum in the first E.U. country they enter. Southern European countries argue they have been forced to take in a disproportionate number of asylum seekers as a result.
Negotiations to overhaul the asylum system have dragged on for years. The European parliament in April approved proposals to distribute refugees and migrants across the bloc, among other changes, and E.U. politicians say they aim to reach an agreement by April 2024. The European Council last week agreed on a negotiation position ahead of talks with the parliament.
“We need to come up with a proper framework for asylum and migration in Europe,” Gavouneli said. “We cannot wait for catastrophe after catastrophe.”
