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For more than a month, 18 fishermen aboard two fishing boats departing from Mazara del Vallo, in western Sicily, have been detained in a barracks in Benghazi, a coastal city in eastern Libya. Libyan authorities, who report to Marshal Khalifa Haftar who controls that part of the country, have provided general information on the situation of the fishermen, and in recent weeks newspapers have tried to reconstruct the reasons for their arrest. Meanwhile, the families of the detained people have asked the government to unblock the negotiations started with Libya for their release: some occupied the council room of the Mazara municipality, others organized a garrison in front of the Chamber of Deputies in Piazza Montecitorio, in Rome.
The crews of the fishing boats “Medinea” and “Antarctica” were detained by the Libyan authorities on September 1, some forty miles off the Libyan coast; eight of them are Italian and six Tunisian, two are Indonesian and two are Senegalese.
The question of sovereignty over waters
It is not the first time that the Libyan authorities have detained Italian fishing boats accused of having violated the waters that Libya considers to be within its jurisdiction. It had happened, for example, on July 23, 2019 in the “Tramontana” of Mazara del Vallo, which was transferred to the port of Misurata and then restarted the next day, or in October 2018, when two other Mazara fishing boats were detained. . and then released.
The issue of the rights of navigation and exploitation of marine waters is one of the issues on which several coastal countries have been clashing for years throughout the Mediterranean. The portion of sea adjacent to the coasts of a given state, the so-called territorial sea, extends for a maximum of 12 nautical miles, that is, about 22 kilometers, and the state exercises a sovereignty – that is, full powers – equal to that exercised on land. However, each state must allow the passage of foreign ships as long as they do not pose a risk to order and peace.
In the contiguous zone, which is the one that extends between 12 and 24 nautical miles, the state instead has control powers over foreign ships to prevent them from committing crimes within its territory, both in the territorial sea and on the continent. Despite this, as the Sicilian Diary, the Libyan authorities contest the presence of the two fishing vessels within an even wider band that Libya has been claiming for years as its exclusive economic zone, which is the portion of the sea in which a country has the exclusive right to economic exploitation of marine resources.
– Read also: Why are Greece and Turkey fighting in the eastern Mediterranean?
The conditions of the fishermen
The Libyan English News Site Libyan Address Journal reported the words of Khaled Al-Mahjoub, a senior Libyan national army officer, who supports Haftar: According to Al-Mahjoub, Libyans are “known” to treat their prisoners “with respect for human rights” and conditions of detention. The health of the detained fishermen is “excellent”. In Libya, he added: “No one is arrested unless they break the law.” The official explained that the 18 fishermen are being investigated for violating the territorial and economic jurisdiction of Libyan waters and therefore will be tried in accordance with the laws of the country, having the right to legal assistance. In addition, Al-Mahjoub said that he “learned” that the fishermen could contact their families.
However, things are not like that. We know that since 1 September there has only been one phone call: the one that the captain of the Medinea, Piero Marrone, made to his mother to explain that the crew is fine, but needs help. Marco Marrone, owner of the same fishing boat and spokesman for the fishermen’s families, told the Sicilian Journal that: «We still have no contact with our fishermen who will be tried in Benghazi on 20 October. They reassure us, but we have not been able to hear the sailors or receive a photograph of them. In addition, according to regional Sicilian news, Libya detained the fishing boats because they were also carrying drugs, an accusation that according to the families of the fishermen is false.
According to a tweet from Libyan Address JournalInstead, General Haftar would like to exchange the liberation of the fishermen with the liberation of four Libyan traffickers who had been sentenced to 30 years in prison in Italy for the death of 49 migrants and who are currently detained in our country.
BREAK: The General Commander of the National Army, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, refuses to release Italian fishermen detained in Libya before the release of young Libyans detained in the jails of Rome.
The Libyan Address Journal#Libya #LibyaNews #LNA #Italy #Italy pic.twitter.com/euwxga6CDX
– The Libyan Address Journal (@LibyanAddressJo) September 24, 2020
Daily fact He wrote that according to a fisherman aboard another fishing boat in the same area of Medinea and Antarctica on the night of September 1, the Libyan coast guard had been “checking for days” several Italian fishing boats.
Among other things, he noted the Done, the fishing boats had been detained a few hours after the departure to Italy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, who had gone to Libya to meet with Prime Minister Fayez al Serraj, whose government is the only one considered legitimate by the UN, and then Aguila Saleh, speaker of the eastern Libyan parliament, who supports Haftar and is in conflict with Serraj. Di Maio and the Libyan authorities had to discuss the credits claimed by Italian companies in Libya and the projects that had been announced in the agreement signed in 2008 between the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the then Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, but the visit was also necessary to improve relations between countries.
The Foreign Ministry announced that it is continuing to work on the case involving “all the relevant international actors”, and on October 7 there was a so-called “question time” in Parliament, that is, an interpellation addressed to a government representative by de Members of Parliament – to take stock of the situation. the Sicilian newspaper wrote that, according to Matilde Siracusano, a Sicilian deputy for Forza Italia, the government “is dangerously underestimating this story.” In addition, the Sicilian newspaper He explained that, according to the Minister of Relations with Parliament, Federico D’Incà, Haftar’s requests to organize an exchange of prisoners are currently “neither confirmed nor formalized.”
– Read also: The story of the 15-year-old migrant who died in Palermo
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