Over 1000 African illegal immigrants died off Mediterranean Coasts in ten months

The European Council, belonging to the European Parliament, revealed on alarming figures about the illegal immigration from African countries, especially North Africa and Maghreb regions.

Italian media sources reported, citing a report by the European Council that at least 1000 illegal immigrants have died in the Mediterranean waters during the last ten months of 2011.

The European Parliamentary Assembly on illegal immigration seeks to warn about what it called “a tragedy”, calling upon an international meeting on Tuesday in Paris.

This call comes amid the indifference of the Maghreb countries’ governments, which neglect the crisis of illegal immigration and the file of the death and loss of hundreds of youth, in the Mediterranean waters.

The same sources added that, the data showed that more than 1000 people died by drowning, in the past ten months while crossing the Mediterranean Sea, asserting that the Committee on Immigration at the European Parliament is seeking, through organizing the International Symposium, to be held on November 29, in its office in Paris, to answer several questions that are haunting the international community, in the form of who is responsible for the loss of many lives? What can be done to avoid these strategies? And what is the experience that countries learned from such tragedies in order to avoid their occurrence in the future?

The committee also seeks to compel governments to take responsibility for what happens and the cases of thousands of deaths and missing in the sea.

The committee explained, in its statement, that the meeting will start by a presentation of the Dutch Tiniki Strike, who worked for several months on this crisis at a ground level, through conducting interviews with survivors and families of victims who died in the sea.

The parliamentary committee will try to provide new proposals with regard to the laws of international right at the waters, especially in cases of rescue operations by coast guards, and work on the evaluation of coordination between the European authorities, the United Nations and the European Agency for the management of cross-border cooperation, also known as “Frontex”.

The international symposium would end by emphasizing on the need to provide satisfactory answers for the victims’ families.

Previously, figures show that over 400 Algerian illegal immigrants died in Mediterranean waters since 2004, and the last victim was a young boy 17 from an eastern town “Annaba”, who died on board of a rubber boat which was heading to the Italian island Sardinia, accompanied by other 28 youth.