A few days into their mission to document deadly Mediterranean crossings, the crew aboard charity boat Nadir came across a drifting empty wooden boat with a single shoe inside.

“The boat looked like it had been drifting for days, because of the dirt of the birds, but we have no way of knowing what happened to the people on it,” Resqship crewperson Andrea Finkel told Times of Malta. 

Hours later they provided emergency aid to a boat of asylum seekers in a tense situation in Malta's Search and Rescue region, where they took on board an unconscious 15-year old girl.

They also narrowly prevented a pushback to Libya.  

But while the human cost of the EU’s inaction is playing out across the Mediterranean, it remains out of sight of mainland Europe, Finkel said.

Making Gozo their base, the crew will be heading out on two-week long missions to gather data and document the asylum seekers they encounter, the pushbacks they witness, the rescues or lack of. 

“We want to make the public in Germany and other European countries aware of what is going on. Our aim at the end of our mission is to also present what we have documented in data to the EU and other relevant authorities,” she said. 

This is Resqship’s second mission. During the first, undertaken in 2019, the crew often found themselves patrolling search and rescue zones alone. They even had to live out the brutal experience of rescue delays.  

At the end of July, a shipwreck just off the Libyan coast resulted in 150 people drowning – they were 10 hours away and the crew were not able to reach them in time, the organisation reported. 

The international crew of six have taken leave out of their normal jobs to come on this mission. Driving them is the hope that greater awareness would prompt the EU – which is meant to be safeguarding human rights – to act. 

“This is dangerous work. We and other members of rescue ships look forward to the day when we are not needed, the day when institutions that should be patrolling and documenting do their job,” said crew member Manuel Caldana from Switzerland. 

“We understand that Malta and Italy are not able to handle the rescues by themselves and there needs to be an EU solution,” Finkel added. 

With many other NGO rescue ships out of action right now due to the vessels having been impounded and other reasons, the crew will also try to provide help to vessels in distress.

“If ships in distress are not able to make contact with a rescue coordination centre, we can make RCC aware of these vessels and also provide them with first response,” she said.  

However, their 19-metre sailing boat does not have the capacity to carry out rescues and that is not the purpose of their mission, she underlined.