Spain welcomes 60 migrants on rescue boat turned away by Italy
Spain
A migrant rescue ship that was turned away by the Italian and Maltese authorities docked in Barcelona yesterday, as Spain sought to counter a European backlash against refugees.
The Open Arms carried 60 migrants from 14 countries, including Palestinians and refugees from the Central African Republic and Cameroon.
With much of Europe closing its borders to Mediterranean migrants, a banner reading ‘‘Safe Passage Barcelona’’ hung from the city hall building as Ada Colau, the left-wing mayor, welcomed the migrants. They were rescued at the weekend from an inflatable boat off Libya. Spanish coastguards also rescued 56 migrants from a dinghy off Motril in southern Spain.
Italy’s new populist government has refused to allow rescue ships to dock, claiming that they are no more than ‘‘taxi services’’ for people smugglers, a claim denied by charities. After Malta also denied the Open Arms authorisation to dock, Spain agreed to receive the ship. Two weeks previously it allowed the Aquarius, carrying 630 migrants, to dock in Valencia after it was also spurned by Italy and Malta.
Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s new Socialist prime minister, is happy to cast his country in benevolent light, as much a distinction with his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy as with the populists in Italy and elsewhere. He has not ruled out accepting more migrants.
For the first time the number of people arriving by sea in Spain last month outpaced those reaching Italy;
160 compared with only 14, according to the International Organisation for Migration. Some 41 made the sea journey to Greece.
So far this year 16,585 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy, with
15,426 arriving in Spain and
13,507 in Greece.
The overall number is considerably lower than in recent years but a higher proportion of them are drowning: 1405 have lost their lives so far this year.
The authorities in Barcelona said the migrants would undergo health checks before being housed at sports centres in two towns outside Barcelona. The Spanish government will grant them 45-day temporary residence permits while they apply for asylum in Spain, or in France, Belgium or Germany, where many have relatives.
‘‘What a good feeling to return home, but there is sadness knowing that yesterday 63 more people died,’’ tweeted Oscar Camps, founder of Proactiva Open Arms, which is based in Barcelona. ‘‘We are taking only 60 people but we could have taken 270 more.’’
Aid workers handed text books to migrants so they could learn basic phrases in Spanish. Activists draped a banner reading ‘‘ProActiva Open Arms’’ over a statue of Columbus which stands near the port.