Proactiva Open Arms

Proactiva Open Arms

Volunteer lifeguards (with yellow-red clothes) from Proactiva Open Arms helping Syrian and Iraqi refugees (Lesbos, October 2015).
Named after	Proactiva Serveis Aquàtics
Founder	Òscar Camps
Founded at	Badalona (Catalonia, Spain)
Type	Private non profit foundation
Purpose	Search and rescue (SAR)
Location	Lesbos, Greece
Region	Mediterranean
Services	Sea rescue lifeguards
Website	www.proactivaopenarms.org

Proactiva Open Arms (POA) is a Spanish

In 2016, Proactiva won the H.E.R.O. Award for Outstanding Team Contribution to a Maritime SAR Operation at the first edition of the UK-based International Maritime Rescue Federation's (IMRF) H.E.R.O. (Honouring Excellence in Rescue Operations) Awards for their participation in saving the lives of over 200 people who had capsized their overloaded vessel off the north shore of Lesbos.^[7]

The NGO has received several other awards, including the

As an NGO, Proactiva developed from Pro-Activa Serveis Aquàtics, a company providing lifeguard and water rescue services, located in

In September the first volunteers arrived on the Greek island to collaborate in rescue operations. In the beginning, the only materials available to them was basic diving equipment. Their main activities were to guide and assist the migrants to arrive safely on the shore.[10]

• 28 October 2015: Alongside Greek coastguards, local fishermen and
  jetskis, in the rescue of 242 survivors of a capsized boat. 60 people lost their lives in the tragedy.^[11]

Previously, experts on migration policy had commented that EU politicians and policy makers have repeatedly declared they are ‘at war’ with the smugglers and that they intend to ‘break the smugglers business model’. "The evidence from our research suggests that smuggling is driven, rather than broken, by EU policy" (Dr Franck Duvell, Centre on Migration Policy and Society at the University of Oxford),^[14] and that "The problem is there’s a huge political agenda around migration, so the more pragmatic of effective alternatives are being overridden by political aspirations of leaders across the European Union. They’ve backed themselves into a political corner where it’s very difficult to do anything else" (Professor Heaven Crawley, Coventry University's Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations).^[14] At the end of 2016 Human Rights Watch stated that "A lack of leadership, vision, and solidarity based on human rights principles are at the core of the EU’s dismal response to refugee and migration challenges".^[15]

Likewise, a December 2016 report by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) analysing the EU's accusations, based on an internal report from the European border agency, Frontex, that the humanitarian organisations running search and rescue operations in the Central Mediterranean were doing so in collusion with smugglers or were helping them to carry out their deadly trade, concluded that "... the alternative implied by Frontex’s concerns about our rescue operations is to let people drown as a strategy to deter the smugglers".^[16]

Also responding to Frontex's allegations that aid groups were indirectly supporting criminal traffickers, Mario Giro, Italy's deputy foreign minister, said it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of so-called "push" and "pull" factors, adding that it was "a misleading controversy being used for internal purposes".^[17]

The view that the rescue NGOs' boats in the Mediterranean acted as a "pull factor" for migrants and traffickers was also challenged in March 2017 by two academics from

On the other hand, researchers also cite testimonies of smugglers bribing police in Greece, Turkey and other countries of transit and that state officials, the military, law enforcement, and border guards are also involved in smuggling.^[14]

2016

4 October: members of the POA aboard the sailing yacht Astral participated in the rescue of hundreds of people on overloaded wooden vessels and rafts and recovered dozens of corpses –with over two dozen people found dead in one boat alone–.^[20]

2017

• 2 January 2017: the POA rescued 112 migrants^[21]
• 24 March 2017: POA lifeguards recovered five corpses from two capsized boats, each of which could hold in overload mode more than 100 people.^[22][23]
• 14 April 2017: The Italian coastguard service confirmed that 2,074 migrants on 16 rubber dinghies and three small wooden boats had been saved that day in 19 rescue operations by coastguards or NGOs. One person was found dead and ninety-seven people are missing, presumed drowned.^[24]
• 6 August 2017: Members of the POA operating on the Golfo Azzurro rescued three people in international waters 100 miles from the Libyan coast in an operation co-ordinated by the Italian coastguard. Reuters reported 48 hours later the ship had still not received authorisation to disembark anywhere, after having been refused permission to dock in Lampedusa, the nearest port to where the rescue took place.^[25] The ship's captain, Adrian Sonneveld, stated that all the instructions concerning the rescue had come from the coast guard control centre in Rome. He added that as the closest port was Lampedusa, "By international maritime law, it is illegal to refuse the Golfo Azzurro entry to this port".^[26]
• 15 August 2017: the Libyan coastguard service threatened the mariners on board the Golfo Azzurro
  RHIBs to place stickers on the side.^[30] Defend Europe's action came shortly after POA founder Oscar Camps had accused the anti-immigration activists of falsifying data, posting images of false boat positions, and making "threats by radio". He also stated that "our AIS signal has been hacked to show we're in Libyan waters, but we're not". The Italian magazine Famiglia Cristiana later confirmed Camps' statement after it had verified the AIS signal, that includes the boat's GPS location, with Marine Traffic, the digital hub that collects and publishes navigation data.^[19]

• 27 January 2018: the POA, in a co-ordinated rescue operation with the Spanish Navy frigate Santa María, rescued 329 people, including 95 women, three of them pregnant, and 37 children, six of whom were newborns.^[31]
• 11 March 2018: the POA rescued three brothers who had fled Libya in a rubber dinghy, one of them a 13-year-old boy suffering from leukemia and with an
  IV line attached to his body.^[32]
• 12 March 2018: the POA rescued 93 migrants, disembarking in Pozzallo, Sicily.^[33]

• 16 March 2018: a Libyan coastguard vessel intercepted the Open Arms
  The Associated Press, quoting the Italian news agency Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), reported that the ship had been impounded by Italian authorities and its captain and two other people were being investigated for human trafficking after arriving in Pozzallo, Sicily with 216 of the 218 migrants they had rescued^[39] in international waters, 73 miles (117 kilometers) from the coast of Libya.^[40] Two of the people rescued, a mother and her sick child, had been evacuated to Malta,^[41][40] where the ship is based, before Italian authorities permitted the ship to proceed to Sicily "given the precarious conditions of the migrants and worsening weather forecasts".^[40]
• 16 April 2018: The Italian court orders the release of the vessel Open Arms, nevertheless the human trafficking investigations continue.[42]

Reactions to impoundment by Italian authorities

Following the impoundment of the rescue ship on arrival at Pozzallo, major international humanitarian NGOs issued statements criticising the action of the Italian authorities.

• AI referred to the incident as "reckless disregard for common decency". The statement added that "It is time for European governments to urgently reset their cooperation with Libya on migration. Their callous complicity with smugglers, criminals and torturers must end and the safety and the rights of refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants must be prioritized".^[43]
• HRW, reporting on the incident, stated that "Proactiva acted to save migrants’ lives and then prevented them from being abused in indefinite detention. It is perverse to try to characterize as criminal a refusal to hand victims to Libyan coast guard forces knowing they could face possible torture and rape in Libyan detention centers".
  inhuman, or degrading treatment in arbitrary detention exposes Italy and other EU states involved to charges of aiding and abetting in serious human rights violations in detention".^[37]
• MSF criticised the "criminalisation" of the NGOs that rescue migrants at sea, pointing out that "under no circumstances" should the people rescued be returned to Libya, and referring to the impoundment of Proactiva's ship as "the latest in a series of actions against NGOs that carry out life-saving rescue operations".[44]
• Vincent Cochetel, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees's (UNHCR) special envoy for the central Mediterranean, stated that he hoped this incident was not a return of what he called "the campaign we saw in 2017 against NGOs involved in rescue-at-sea".^[45]
• Referring to the Code of Conduct for NGOs, Senator Luigi Manconi noted that "the code has no legal force. It is a treaty agreement between the Ministry and an individual. I do not find that a violation occurred, and if it did, it certainly would not constitute a crime." He went on to add that, "information to the flag state qualifies more as a commitment, while saving those in danger is an obligation. The hierarchy is very clear."^[46]

2020

On 8 and 9 September 2020 the crew of Open Arms picked up three groups of 77, 116 and 83 migrants.

In February 2021, the POA rescued over 100 migrants off the coast of Libya.[50]

Vessels

In July 2016, the NGO received the

At the end of 2016, Astral was substituted by Golfo Azzurro, a fishing trawler 43 metres in length and 8 metres beam.^[55] Based in Malta, this vessel covered the NGO's rescue operations in the central Mediterranean region and in international waters off the northern coast of Libya.^[55]

In mid-2017, the POA commissioned