POVERTY: MIGRATION: The risks of rescue at sea

JOHANNESBURG, 5 December 2011 (IRIN) -

 Photo: Kate Thomas/IRIN
A boat carrying migrants from Libya arrives in Lampedusa

 Two years ago, Abdiselam Sheik Omar left his home town of Jijiga in Ethiopia’s eastern Somali region and embarked on a journey he hoped would take him across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen and eventually to Saudi Arabia. “It’s easy to find work there,” he told IRIN. “The problem is crossing the sea.”
Omar was well aware of the risks and hardships, having made the journey twice before. He knew that during the three- to five-day crossing from Puntland in northern Somalia there would be little to eat or drink, and his smugglers would not hesitate to beat uncooperative passengers or even throw them off the boat.
When the rickety, overloaded boat he was on started sinking, one of the migrants drowned before the remaining 34 were rescued by the Yemeni Coast Guard. The passengers and their smugglers were arrested and jailed on reaching Yemen, but Omar was glad to be alive.
After 20 days he was released and made it as far as the border with Saudi Arabia before being arrested again. This time he was deported back to Ethiopia. “I won’t try it again, even though I’m jobless,” he said.
Every year, thousands of migrants risk hazardous sea crossings in a desperate bid to escape poverty, persecution or conflict. If they run into trouble, as many do, their only hope of being rescued is a long-standing maritime code of conduct backed by numerous international protocols that compel passing ships to render assistance to any vessel in distress.
In the last year alone, cruise ships have picked up Cuban migrants off the coast of Florida, the Indonesian navy has rescued Afghan nationals trying to reach Australia, and Spanish authorities have assisted African refugees and migrants drifting in the Mediterranean.
Many other sinking or capsized vessels were either missed or ignored, and countless migrants have lost their lives at sea. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that between February and October this year, 2,000 mostly African migrants fleeing the crisis in Libya drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean. Since the beginning of 2011, a further 131 Somali and Ethiopian refugees and migrants have perished in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden trying to reach Yemen.

Disincentives
The discovery of a small vessel in apparent distress represents a dilemma for ships’ masters, particularly in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, where pirates are most active.
“It’s very difficult to distinguish from a distance whether it’s a boat with migrants or with pirates, so they assume it may be pirates,” said Captain Hartmut Hesse of the International Maritime Organization.
It's very difficult to distinguish from a distance whether it's a boat with migrants or with pirates, so they assume it may be pirates
Current guidance to the shipping industry on the threat of piracy advises ships to keep their distance from small vessels. It does not deal with the possibility that they could be carrying migrants in need of assistance, said John Murray of the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS). "The other big issue is that ships must know that coastal states will meet their obligations in disembarking people rescued at sea."
For ships’ masters everywhere, the biggest disincentive for picking up migrants in distress is the real possibility that they will waste time and money looking for a country willing to let them come ashore.
The International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS Convention) and the International Convention on Maritime Sea and Rescue (SAR Convention) both outline the duty of relevant countries to cooperate and coordinate rescue operations at sea, but many are unwilling to accept undocumented migrants.
“They should be offered a place of safety in the closest country from where they were picked up,” said Christopher Horwood, coordinator of the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat (RMMS), run by the Danish Refugee Council in Nairobi, which provides information and support for migration responses between the Horn of Africa and Yemen. "There are worrying signs that countries are not living up to their responsibilities... some are not even permitting [ships with rescued migrants] to dock."
Whether the ship is a commercial vessel contracted to deliver cargo by a certain date or a military vessel patrolling a coastline, the probability of a delay in disembarking migrants "is likely to undermine some of the commitment to picking people up," said Murray. "That’s the real world; that’s the world we live in."
Most ships these days have small crews and are not equipped to provide food and accommodation to extra passengers for days at a time.

Lack of cooperation
The problem is not new. A decade ago, Australian authorities refused to permit a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, carrying 438 Afghan nationals rescued from a fishing boat drifting in international waters near Christmas Island, to enter Australian waters. The episode sparked a political controversy in Australia and a diplomatic spat between Australia and Norway.
Despite much debate about how future incidents could be avoided and amendments to maritime law, the problems have continued, said Anja Klug, head of the UNHCR asylum/migration unit. “We think the real problem lies in the lack of cooperation among the different states involved in these situations."
At an experts meeting convened by UNHCR in Djibouti recently, Klug and her colleagues presented some practical tools aimed at improving cooperation and burden-sharing of sea rescue operations between states in regions affected by high levels of migration.
One such tool is a model framework that provides for government cooperation in establishing regional task forces to oversee rescue operations, identifying the most appropriate countries for disembarkation, and ensuring that adequate arrangements are in place to receive and process rescued migrants with varying claims to international protection.
"We’re not aiming for this to be adopted on a binding global level," Klug told IRIN. "We want countries to come together and assess their needs. [UNHCR] can facilitate, but ultimately governments need to come to agreements."
At the meeting, UNHCR also proposed that “mobile protection response teams”, staffed by experts from government, UNHCR and other international organizations, be dispatched to countries lacking the resources or capacity to deal with an influx of migrants and asylum seekers arriving by boat.
"Normally, reception arrangements are a task of governments but they sometimes don’t have the capacity," said Klug. UNHCR, together with the International Organization for Migration and other NGOs, are already providing such assistance along the coast of Yemen and on the Italian island of Lampedusa, where large numbers of migrants have come ashore in recent months as a result of the crisis in Libya.

Need for guidance
Another UNHCR document suggests some basic standard operating procedures for ships' masters who encounter migrants in trouble at sea, such as what constitutes a "distress situation" and what information should be sought from rescued persons.
Murray, who attended the Djibouti meeting for the International Chamber of Shipping, said there was a need for such guidance but emphasized that it was not the role of a ship's crew to categorize people. "We feel very strongly there should be no pressure on the ship’s master to engage in any processing or profiling of people who’ve been recovered. As far as the ship is concerned, they’re people in distress at sea," he told IRIN.
Noting that boats rescued at sea often contain a complex mixture of asylum seekers, economic migrants and people with special needs, such as minors, Horwood of RMMS agreed that "It shouldn’t be the burden of a ship captain to decide if he’s got economic migrants or refugees. Many of the migrants don’t qualify for international protection, even though they might be on the same boat as those that do. This is the phenomenon of mixed migration."
Horwood welcomed the UNHCR initiative. "These people are victims of situations [that cause them to migrate] and on top of that they find themselves rejected when they’re genuinely in distress at sea."
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94383

POVERTY: Slavery is alive and well

CAIRO, Jul 11, 2011 (IPS) - Simba Russeau

In dire need of money to assist her family back home, 27-year-old Makeda from Ethiopia was forced to return to the Middle East as a domestic worker.
As the world marks the Global Population Day Jul. 11, the plight of many like her is increasingly in focus.
Instead of taking the legal route, Makeda opted to seek out assistance from another Ethiopian woman who had been employed in the Middle East for more than ten years, and was known for helping women find sponsors.
Some five years later Makeda ran into difficulties when she took on work with an expat family that wanted to sponsor her. But her passport was with the female trafficker who had brought her in.
"The initial sponsorship that the trafficker brought me under had expired, and the local man who allowed us to use his name for a fee wasn’t paid, so he placed a claim with the authorities that I had run away," Makeda told IPS.
"The woman demanded more money for me to relinquish my passport, so we sought legal counseling. A migration lawyer contacted the woman, and threatened to inform her employer. But in the end it was discovered that the woman’s employer was a well-known lawyer in the country who was helping her traffic women into the region," Makeda said.
"It took me years to pay off the fees she charged to bring me in. Although I paid the extra money and obtained my passport, the process took so long that the expat family left and I ended up illegal."
"For many, the simplicity of the transaction when dealing with illegal recruiters is more attractive," Pardis Mahdavi, author of ‘Gridlock: Labour, Migration and Human Trafficking’ told IPS. "If governments could put into place a system that allows the legal channels for migration to be easier, it could limit the number of workers migrating under informal middlemen."
Slavery, which is a system where people are treated as property and forced to work, is very much a part of today’s global economy. It rivals and in some regions eclipses the international drug trade.
There are nearly 27 million slaves worldwide, generating 1.3 billion dollars in annual profits, according to conservative estimates. Some estimates show a world slave population as high as 200 million, with the majority held under debt bondage.
Considered a new form of slavery, human trafficking is one of the fastest growing criminal industries in the world. The United Nations (UN) estimates that nearly three million people are trafficked annually.
"Global human trafficking is fueled by the insatiable demand for unmediated access to other human beings - to their labour, their personhood, to all that makes each of us unique, and all of us generic," Eileen Scully, author of ‘Pre-Cold War Traffic in Sex Labor’ told IPS.
"The demand in EU countries for ‘exotic women’, for example, is not merely a demand for non-local women, or for women from cultures that supposedly do not stigmatise prostitution. This demand is, rather, for ‘trafficked women’ and ‘trafficked children’, meaning individuals who have been manoeuvered into untenable, inescapable situations, where having once said yes to the general proposition, they are unable to say no to the particulars when later presented."
The new International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention on Domestic Workers adopted in June aims to ensure that women - who constitute nearly 50 percent of the global migrant population – are treated as human beings.
"When male migrant workers come to work in construction or other service and industry sectors in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, they are protected under the labour law. Even if they don’t have full rights their work is recognised as work under the law, which is not the case for domestic workers (in the Arab region)," Simel Esim, gender specialist at the ILO's Regional Office for the Arab States told IPS.
"Jordan and Lebanon are the only countries where ministries of labour are in charge of a significant number of the institutional responsibilities regarding migrant domestic workers," adds Esim.
"In the case of the GCC countries the oversight of domestic workers is under the jurisdiction of the ministries of interior instead of the ministries of labour, which leaves domestic workers outside the purview of the labour law. The emphasis on domestic workers is, therefore about their recognition as workers, with equal rights to workers in other sectors."
Lacking legal protection, domestic workers are among the most exploited and abused workers in the world. Rights advocates have long argued that exclusion from labour laws and recruitment-related abuses has left domestic workers in the Middle East vulnerable to exploitation, sexual abuse, forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking and conditions akin to slavery.
The new convention requires governments to regulate private employment agencies that impose heavy debt burdens or misinform migrant domestic workers about their jobs, prohibit the practice of deducting domestic workers’ salaries to pay recruitment fees, investigate complaints, and labour inspection in private homes.
"Policies relating to trafficking need to fall more in line with the reality of forced migration globally because most migrant workers are not the stereotypical sex worker chained to a bed," adds Mahdavi.
"In fact they are men and women that are tied to metaphorical chains like debt and poverty that forces these workers to migrate and remain in poor working conditions."
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56424