- Rome hasn’t let the migrants off the Sea Watch 3 in the Italian island of Lampedusa since the June 12 rescue
- Spokesman Babar Baloch of the UNHCR said: “Italy has the responsibility to let these people disembark”
GENEVA: The UN migration and refugee agencies on Friday urged Italy’s government to let 43 migrants from Libya disembark from a boat that had rescued them in the Mediterranean Sea.
Rome has not let the migrants off the Sea Watch 3 onto the Italian island of Lampedusa since the June 12 rescue.
International Organization for Migration spokesman Joel Millman said Libya’s capital had “offered its port to the Sea Watch. The Italian government said they should go to Tripoli.”
UNHCR spokesman Babar Baloch said “the country in which territory this boat is, they have the obligation to let these people disembark,” adding “no one should be returned back” to war-torn Libya.
“These desperate people need to disembark,” Baloch said. “This is an obligation under international law.” Millman said Italian coast guard teams rescued and took another 80 people to Lampedusa overnight.
Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, alluding to the Dutch-flagged vessel, said the migrants “can go to the Netherlands.”
Salvini says refugees escaping wars will be welcomed in Italy, but other migrants heading to Europe for economic reasons have no right to enter.
Salvini, who heads the right-wing and anti-immigration League, has adopted a hard stance on migration, refusing to open Italian ports to NGO boats that have rescued migrants in the Mediterranean.
The UN refugee agency said on Thursday it had evacuated 131 African refugees from Libya to its emergency transit center in neighboring Niger.
The UNHCR released a statement Thursday saying the evacuees were from Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan, and included 65 children.
Some of them were held in detention centers for over a year, the statement said.
The UNHCR says it has assisted 1,297 vulnerable refugees out of Libya in 2019, including 711 who were sent to Niger, 295 to Italy and 291 who have been resettled in Europe and Canada.
The agency also warned that more than 3,800 refugees and migrants held in detention centers remain at risk in war-torn Libya.