Seriously though, if you were screaming #BlackLivesMatter or for that matter #ALLLIVESMATER, but you fail to support the search and rescue organisations in the Mediterranean Sea, then what is your shouting really all about?

@SOSMedGermany currently have 118 people on their ship ‘Ocean Viking’ and no European authority takes responsibility. This has been the case with every rescue in the last couple of years. It’s a complete denial of responsibility, and most people are completely silent!

This is a complete and utter failure of European and U.K. policy. In fact, it’s worse. We actually pay our taxes in order to fund the capture and return of people to the hell from which they are trying to escape

We are circumventing international laws which are designed to protect human beings who are just like us!

SOLAS, the international law of the sea was created in 1915, following the sinking of the Titanic where other ships sailed by without rescue. We vowed; never again!

Chapter V, Regulation 33 of that very same convention states “The master of a ship at sea which is in a position to be able to provide assistance on receiving information from any source that persons are in distress at sea, is bound to proceed with all speed to their assistance”

This is a convention that we all signed up to, but it has become commonplace to ignore refugee boats. Do their lives not matter?

Following the end of WW2, we vowed “never again”. Part of that was to never again make the same horrific mistakes that we made before, during and after WW2. We signed the Geneva convention and the 1951 refugee convention to put into law the lessons that we had learned.

“No Contracting State shall expel or return ("refouler") a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

Yet we pay (through our foreign aid budget) for the Libyan “Coast Guard” to capture and return people to a country which we know to be in the midst of a civil war, where we know that the people returned will be sold and tortured. Don’t believe me?

We do this ALL THE TIME, in full knowledge that those returned by our state funded militias will be tortured and often killed. We are murderers by proxy https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/03/eu-funds-libyan-coast-guard-but-has-limited-monitoring-capacity-leaked-report-suggests

When will people come to understand that those lives matter? Tell me how this is ok. For I simply cannot comprehend such injustices occurring on our behalf. And for what? These a human beings!

End