How rescuing drowning migrants became a crime

The Iuventa ran hundreds of missions to save migrants from drowning off the coast of Libya. But after Europe cracked down on migration, its crew found themselves facing prosecution

As patrol boats with flashing blue lights surrounded the Iuventa, just outside the port of Lampedusa on the evening of 1 August 2017, its crew were more annoyed than alarmed. For three days, the old fishing trawler, crewed by volunteers from the German NGO Jugend Rettet (Youth Rescue), had answered a string of requests from the Italian coastguard that to them made no sense. This madness hopefully will soon be over," read a message sent from the ship's bridge to Jugend Rettet base camp shortly after 10pm.

In the summer of 2017, two years on from the peak of Europe's refugee crisis, smugglers in Libya were still sending hundreds of people a day to sea in unsafe rubber boats, and the Iuventa's crew wanted to be where the action was. In a patch of sea just off the coast of north Africa, about a dozen NGO ships were searching for boats in distress - a direct challenge, as many of them saw it, to European governments that had scaled back state-run rescue efforts.