World
Italian coastguards carried out some 40-cooridanated operations in the southern Mediterranean Sea and rescued about 6,500 migrants off the coast of Libya on Monday. Migrants, many of them believed to be from Eritrea and Somalia, set off in about 20 wooden fishing boats a few hours before they were rescued. With a security vacuum in Libya, people-smuggling continues unabated, pushing the number of crossings between Libya and Italy to near-record levels.
Monday’s rescue operations were carried out by Italian coastguards, the E.U.'s border agency Frontex and the N.G.O.s Proactiva Open Arms and Medecins Sans Frontieres. Critics believe that rescue missions encourage asylum seekers to make risky journey through the Mediterranean, writes The Guardian. However, when the rescue operations were temporarily suspended in 2015, the number of migrant crossings registered a dramatic surge and so did the number of migrant drownings.
The number of migrants arriving in Europe via Turkey-Greece route witnessed a significant drop after the European Union struck a deal with Turkey in March, reports the BBC. However, war, poverty and crumbling state of law and order in some nations in northern Africa have prompted more than 100,000 people to take up perilous sea journey to reach Italy so far this year.
