The European Union still has a shameful record when it comes to Mediterranean sea migrants, German charity rescue captain Carola Rackete said Monday.
On June 29, 2019, Rackete took her Sea-Watch 3 vessel to the Italian port of Lampedusa to bring ashore 40 migrants, ignoring no-entry orders by then far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini.
Salvini is no longer in office, but "nothing fundamentally changed within the EU and at the EU external border" concerning sea migrants, she said in a statement marking one year since the confrontation.
"If there was any change at all, things only got worse during the last year," Rackete charged. She mentioned an Easter weekend incident in which she said 51 migrants and five bodies were discovered in the Maltese rescue zone and illegally returned to Libya.
She also said, "different European states, including Spain, Malta, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, continue to hinder rescue and monitoring missions at sea and in the air."
According to Rackete, people are drowning in the Mediterranean "because the European Union wants them to drown, to scare those who might attempt to cross."
She endorsed a campaign against EU border agency Frontex, which she described as the enforcer of "the racist border policy of European states."
"If #BlackLivesMatter in the US demands to defund the police departments, we consequently have to demand to #DefundFrontex in Europe," Rackete said.
In Italy, Rackete was briefly arrested and her vessel was impounded for six months. Prosecutors are still deciding whether to press charges or drop the case against her.
A Frontex spokesman referred to the #DefundFrontex hashtag as "nonsense from fringe groups" and maintained that the border agency was helping to "secure the borders for hundreds of millions of people throughout Europe."
"Respect for human rights is at the heart of all we do," the spokesman said.
