Smuggling Of Migrants By Sea Case Study

1.1. A year after more than 360 men, women and children drowned when their vessel capsized a mile off Lampedusa, Italy, the smuggling of migrants by sea continues to be a major and growing concern. The number of smuggled migrants arriving in small and unseaworthy vessels to the European Union continues to rise according to the International Organisation for Migration. The efforts to address this concern have largely focused on surveillance of Member States’ external sea borders and on rescue operations aimed to reduce the tragic death toll of migrants and to ensure the migrants’ international protection. Little has been done to prevent and dismantle the criminal organisations behind this deadly business. This situation may be explained by the
One of the main challenges is to identify the country of origin of smuggling of migrants by sea. This is due to the sophisticated modus operandi of the criminal organisations and their ability to quickly change their methods and routes. For instance, migrants may start their journey in countries affected by war, humanitarian crisis or persecution, such as Syria, Irak or Somalia, and arrive in North Africa where they are boarding on large vessels to be transported to coastal EU Member States. From the large vessels, migrants are often transferred in small, overcrowded and unsafe boats in the high seas, to avoid interception and checks of the large vessels. This implies extremely organised criminal networks that arrange in detail the smuggling of migrants and, possibly, the existence of links with criminal groups in the coastal Member States where the small boats arrive and perhaps in other Member States as
Furthermore, it is often difficult to establish whether a given case is actually one of illegal immigrant smuggling or of trafficking of human beings (THB). The distinction between illegal immigrant smuggling and THB is not always obvious to authorities, as an overview may not be available first hand (e.g., migrants might agree to be smuggled by sea into a EU Member State, but later in the process they may be smuggled into exploitation and become “trafficked”, being forced, for instance, to work for very low wages to pay for their transportation). This often leads to a blurring of the lines between trafficking and smuggling. Another problem in relation to the detection and investigation human trafficking involving migration through the sea is the fact that only the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants deals with interception at sea, while the Protocol against Human Trafficking does not contain any provisions on