New piece for @gdnlongread - how a covert surveillance operation and a spying plot involving a leading Italian opposition politician led to ten volunteer rescuers facing years in prison. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/sep/22/how-rescuing-drowning-migrants-became-a-crime-iuventa-salvini-italy

Since late last year, I've been trying to piece this story together. At its heart are questions that resonate elsewhere today: what prompts states to let people die even when it is within their power to help? And what happens when people resist such decisions?

Between 2016 and 2017 the Iuventa - an old fishing trawler bought by the German NGO Jugend Rettet - saved the lives of more than 14,000 people in the Mediterranean. It was part of a huge effort by private aid organisations, lauded at first for their humanitarian actions.

Why were these actions necessary? Because European governments had, broadly, decided that rescuing people from drowning only encouraged others to make the journey. Their priority was to stop migration, but they presented it as a humanitarian duty.

For this, the NGOs were deemed an inconvenient presence. While the EU labelled them a "pull factor", a far-right smear campaign accused them of being criminals. Instead of being challenged, the smears were indulged. Today, rescuers have been all but forced from the Mediterranean.

Europe often seems to act on the assumption that people disappear once they are pushed back from the border. They don't. "I knew what was happening in the Mediterranean and I made a gamble out of it," as Malik, rescued by the Iuventa in 2016, told me. What happens to people now?

"We never thought we were a solution to the problem,” one member of the Iuventa's crew told me. “The question for us was: how can we empower people ... to end their own suffering? And the very first step was to not let them die.” That, to me, is the essential point of this story.