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The 18 fishermen who had been detained in Libya since 1 September, accused of having entered Libyan waters illegally, have been released. This morning, the Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Luigi Di Maio, went personally to Benghazi, Libya, to negotiate his release. Details of the release are not known at the moment, but Di Maio wrote on Facebook late in the morning that “our fishermen are free,” adding that “the government continues to strongly support the stabilization process in Libya.” This is what President Giuseppe Conte and I reiterate today in Haftar, during our meeting in Benghazi.
Good homecoming pic.twitter.com/MKYISFeTmV
– Giuseppe Conte (@GiuseppeConteIT) December 17, 2020
The “Medinea” and “Antarctica” fishing boats and their crews – eight Italians, six Tunisians, two Filipinos and two Senegalese – left Mazara del Vallo, in western Sicily, and stopped on September 1, about sixty kilometers off the coast of Libya. The Libyan authorities contested their presence in a part of the sea that Libya has unilaterally claimed since 2005 as its exclusive economic zone, that is, the strip of sea in which a country has the exclusive right to the economic exploitation of marine resources. Since that time, apart from a phone call on September 16, there was no news from the fishermen until November 10, when some relatives had been able to hear them in a short phone call.
In these 108 days, the families of the fishermen have continued to demand the intervention of the government for their release, organizing demonstrations in Mazara del Vallo and even sitting in Rome in Piazza di Montecitorio, in front of the Parliament building.
One of the most debated hypotheses about the kidnapping of the 18 fishermen was that Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who rules in eastern Libya, wanted to change his for the release of four Libyan smugglers who are serving a 30-year prison sentence in Italy . However, the Minister of Relations with Parliament, Federico D’Incà, had explained that the requests to organize a swap of prisoners “were neither confirmed nor formalized in any way.”
At the same time, in late September, a senior official near Haftar, Khaled Al-Mahjoub, said that the fishermen would be tried under local laws for violating Libyan territorial waters.
The portion of sea adjacent to the coasts of a certain state, the so-called territorial sea, extends for a maximum of 12 nautical miles, that is, about 22 kilometers; Even if it is required to allow the passage of foreign ships provided that they do not imply a risk to order and peace, the State exercises a sovereignty – that is, full powers – equal to those exercised on land. In the contiguous zone, that is, the one that extends between 12 and 24 nautical miles, the state has control powers over foreign ships to prevent them from committing crimes within its territory, in the territorial sea and on land. Libyan authorities are contesting the presence of the two fishing vessels within a 62-kilometer radius beyond the first 12 that Libya has unilaterally claimed as its exclusive economic zone since 2005.
As the Foreign Ministry had announced in mid-October, the news of the trial was not official, so it was not known if or when the fishermen would actually be tried.
One of the other hypotheses, the reporter from Mazara Home, Francesco Mezzapelle, was that the kidnapping of the fishermen could be linked to a trade agreement last year that later faded. In the summer of 2019, the Italian federation Federpesca – headed by Confindustria – and an investment agency linked to Marshal Haftar had concluded an agreement through a Maltese company to allow some Italian fishing boats to fish in the claimed exclusive economic zone. unilaterally by the Libyans. , upon payment of a monthly fee. According to Mezzapelle, the kidnapping by Haftar’s militias may have been a “grudge” against Italy because the agreement with Federpesca had been postponed due to protests by the Libyan government of Prime Minister Fayez al Serraj; and since Italy only recognizes the government of Serraj, opposed to Haftar’s, the latter would have responded by kidnapping the fishermen to request new negotiations.
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