Don't spread misinformation. It's the Italian SAR that is responsible for assigning them a port for disembarkation. It is by international maritime law decidedly not the responsibility of the rescuer to find a willing port. There is also nothing that says it has to be the closest port. Only that it has to be a safe port. The Italian SAR never assigns Tunisian ports. I don't know whether it is because of the hassle involved or because they don't consider them safe.

Not irrelevant at all. As I said, the non-refoulement principle applies. Besides, it's the Italian SAR that is responsible for assigning them a port for disembarkation. It is by international maritime law decidedly not the responsibility of the rescuer to find a willing port.

What's cynical about rescuing people from drowning at sea?

We have asylum laws that guarantee the right to apply for asylum as an inalienable human right to every person on German soil, regardless how they arrived in the country. Italy has such a law as well.

Tunisia has been found to drive refugees into the Libyan desert and leave them to die there.

It's most certainly not a safe place for non-Tunisian refugees. Non-refoulement principle applies.

That way of thinking is extremely cynical. You could use it to argue against any charitable operation that helps victims of crime - and even against any safety mechanism. Doctors are bad because their existence incentivizes people to take risks they might shy away from if there were no doctors. Leaving injured people to die is good because it prevents others from taking unnecessary risk.

Ratifying a convention means putting it into national law. The enforcement mechanism is Italy's legal system.

That's not quite the same. Buying child slaves gives money to the slaveholders. That's why charities don't do it. Freeing slaves without giving money to slaveholders is not an issue at all.

You misunderstood something there. There is no way to claim asylum from outside the US. For good reason: It would completely overwhelm the system and lead to a massive increase in successful applications for political asylum. You first have to cross the border. What the US wants to do is expedite the process of processing asylum claims: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-unveils-rule-speed-up-asylum-processing-deportations-border-2022-03-24/

Countries that signed and ratified the UN refugee convention allow anyone to enter their country by any means whatsoever to claim political asylum. That's the whole point of the convention.

Furthermore, something like 90% of sea rescues in the Mediterranean are done by the Italian and Maltese coastguards. The NGOs are not actually all that relevant. The reason Italy is making their job harder is domestic political posturing.

That's solely due to the actions of the so-called "Libyan coastguard".

The way he publicized it was quite awesome as well:

> “Like most people who have made it in the art world, I bought a yacht to sail around the Mediterranean,” Banksy wrote ironically in an Instagram video about it at the time.

Well, if they wanted to, they could still return them to Ukrainian orphanages.

That's not something that should be stopping them from returning the children. There is zero reason why these Ukrainian children should be in Russia rather than in Ukraine, the only possible exception being if their closest relatives are in Russia.

That would be easy to do, considering he is Russia's permanent representative to the UN and as such attending every meeting of the UN Security Council in New York City, in person. Alas, I don't think it's going to happen.

That's not the fault of the people helping the homeless.

Badass indeed

> When Emperor Napoleon III and his army were captured by the Prussians in 1870, the French Third Republic was proclaimed in Paris. But the provisional government continued the war against the Prussians and a four-month siege of Paris resulted in bleak hardship. Parisians starved and froze to death. Some managed to save themselves by eating cats, dogs and rats. The government surrendered, but Michel and other Parisians had taken up arms and organised themselves as a National Guard. When the Paris Commune was proclaimed Michel was named head of the Women's Vigilance Committee and played a key role in initiating economic and social reforms. Michel pushed through the separation of church and state, initiated educational reforms and codified rights for workers. The reforms were not carried out due to the short duration of the Commune. When Michel was tried, she demanded to be killed by firing squad and proclaimed "If you let me live, I shall never stop crying for vengeance, and I shall avenge my brothers by denouncing the murderers". The military court refused to make her a martyr.

She was a feminist, too.

> Michel frequently spoke on women's rights from an anarchist perspective. She not only advocated education for women, but also that marriage should be free and that men should hold no property rights over women.

I don't see how one prevents us from doing the other.

It's like arguing we can't help the homeless until we have found out what drives homelessness.

That clashes with International Maritime Law though. There is a duty to rescue.

> There is a duty pursuant to international law for a ship to attempt the rescue of persons at danger at sea.

https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/blog/2020/03/duty-rescue

We'll see, I guess.

Nah, once they had picked up the additional migrants, the Italian SAR coordinator told them to disembark all passengers in Lampedusa. No one brings resuced migrants back to Libya, not even the Italian coastguard themselves.

> The coast guard said it had ordered the MV Louise Michel ship to dock in Trapani in Sicily after it performed an initial rescue operation in Libya's Search And Rescue area. The ship instead went to assist migrants on three other boats in Malta's Search And Rescue area.

Doubt that will stand in court.

Sounds more like they were looking for some excuse to justify stopping the rescue ship, for political posturing.