Sea-Watch 3 captain Carola Rackete is seen on board the vessel at sea in the Mediterranean. She has been arrested after her ship forced its way to dock in Italy. Photo / AP
Sea-Watch 3 captain Carola Rackete is seen on board the vessel at sea in the Mediterranean. She has been arrested after her ship forced its way to dock in Italy. Photo / AP
Italian authorities arrested the captain of a humanitarian rescue vessel after the boat on Saturday forced its way to dock on a tiny Italian island with 40 migrants aboard in defiance of orders not to come ashore.
The Sea-Watch 3 and its captain, Carola Rackete, was the first humanitarian rescue boat to directly challenge Italy's decision last year to close its ports to ships carrying migrants rescued in the Mediterranean.
It's stance - part of its its hard-line stance against migration - has left Europe struggling to manage even the fairly limited flow of people seeing to reach Europe from North Africa. Time and time again, boats that have rescued migrants have found themselves in limbo for days or weeks in the Mediterranean.
An Italian Coast Guard boat patrols next to the Sea-Watch 3 in the Mediterranean Sea just off the southern Italian island of Lampedusa on Thursday. The ship forced it's way into port. Photo / AP
The last stage of the 17-day standoff between Italy and the Sea-Watch 3 played out in dramatic fashion.
Italy's interior minister, Matteo Salvini, accused the "pirate" captain of ramming a government motorboat as it made its way to the dock on the island of Lampedusa. Initial video from the port, however, did not clearly show any contact.
"This is a criminal act, an act of war," Salvini said.
The German rescue group said its captain Rachete had upheld the laws of the sea and did what it took to get people to safety. In a statement, Sea-Watch chairman Johannes Bayer said Rackete "did exactly the right thing."
"She upheld the law of the sea and brought people to safety," he said.
According to a description of the events on ANSA, an Italian news service, people from Lampedusa were camped out near the port, and clashed verbally over how the standoff had been handled.
ANSA reported that an Italian government boat had "attempted several times" to stop the Sea-Watch 3 from landing, but then aborted the effort to avoid getting stuck between the dock and the German NGO vessel.
Captain Carola Rackete, left, watches as the Dutch-flagged Sea-Watch 3 ship docks at Lampedusa island's harbour. Photo / AP
As of Saturday morning, Rackete, was under house arrest and facing charges that could lead up to 10 years in prison. Italy said the 40 migrants would be redistributed to five European countries - France, Finland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Germany - in a diplomatic deal.
In the case of the Sea-Watch, the vessel was first asked to return the migrants to warring Libya. But Rackete said laws of the sea required her to take them to a safe port - and Tripoli did not qualify.
The case of the Sea-Watch 3 had dominated Italian news broadcasts for several days, after the captain, Rackete, had announced on Wednesday she was navigating the boat into Italian territory in defiance of Italian orders.
But the Sea-Watch was stopped just outside the harbour, and remained off the island of Lampedusa for several days, hoping for a green light to dock.
In this image taken on June 27, 2019 a migrant on a stretcher is carried onto an Italian Coast Guard boat from the Sea-Watch 3 rescue ship. Photo / AP
Before sunrise Saturday, Rackete said in a video posted to Twitter that Italian authorities had "notified us that they will not help to bring the rescued off the ship. That means we are still waiting for a solution which is not in sight so far."
"Therefore," Rackete said, "I have decided to enter the harbour, which is free at night, on my own."
On June 12, the Sea-Watch 3 had rescued 53 migrants who had departed Libya in a flimsy dinghy. Some were subsequently evacuated to Italy for emergency medical reasons, but 40 remained on board the 165-foot vessel.
"It looks like the motorboat managed to flee. But that said, this could still be an attempt to commit violence," said Francesco Munari, a professor at the Genoa Institute for International, European and Maritime Law, who cited portions of the Italian navigation code. "And that would lead to penalties, though diminished ones."
