pace- sinking-incidents
Strasbourg, 07.09.2012 – “The latest sinking incidents – the terrible loss of life off the coast of Turkey yesterday, in which so many children died, and the news that some people are still missing after the incident off Lampedusa in the early hours of this morning – are a warning to Europe of what can happen when humanitarian tragedies are ignored, said Tineke Strik (Netherlands, SOC), who has investigated boat deaths in the Mediterranean for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).
“We know that a failure to react adequately to the humanitarian consequences of the Libya conflict caused unnecessary deaths. Let us not repeat those mistakes with the conflict in Syria,” she concluded.
Earlier this year, Senator Strik’s inquiry into a March 2011 incident uncovered a failure to react to distress calls and “a catalogue of failures” which led to the deaths of 63 people fleeing the conflict in Libya by boat. (more...)