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Calls for action after at least 150 migrants drown off Libyan coast


image: UNHCR

image: UNHCR

Source: JRS/Vatican Media

At least 150 people drowned, after a boat carrying migrants sank eight kilometres off the coast of Libya yesterday. The boat was carrying around 250 people from a number of African and Arab countries. The UN refugee agency said dozens of survivors have been taken to the Tajoura detention centre near Tripoli, located near the front lines of fighting between rival Libyan factions.

Following this latest tragedy, many organizations working with migrants and refugees have called for action to protect the lives and the dignity of migrants crossing the Mediterranean.

Francesca Cuomo, Communications Officer at the Jesuit-run Centro Astalli, told Vatican Radio it is calling on national institutions and on the international community to put plans into place to avoid further loss of life.

Cuomo said the Centro Astalli expresses its deepest condolences for the victims and concern for the fate of the migrants brought back to Libya: a country at war and an unsafe port.

We therefore, she said, call on national institutions and European nations:

- To immediately restore search and rescue operations at sea;

- To activate a plan to evacuate migrants from Libya, where their lives are in danger due to violence and abuse that are daily practice;

- to provide legal entry routes into Europe for migrants who are now forced to resort to human trafficking in the absence of safe and regulated routes;

- To open humanitarian channels for those who escape wars, persecution and extreme poverty and have the right to ask for protection and reception in Europe.

"It is important," Cuomo concluded, "to invest urgently in alternative solutions that protect people's lives and dignity so as not to be complicit in these deaths."

Earlier this month Pope Francis decried an air strike on the Tajoura centre in which scores of people were killed and many more injured.

He called for the opening of humanitarian corridors for the safe passage of migrants most in need and has repeatedly asked policy makers for new legislation that safeguards the lives and the dignity of people fleeing war, persecution and poverty.

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