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UN Human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein said that smugglers accused of sinking a boat, causing the deaths of around 500 migrants, are probably guilty of “mass murder” and should be put on trial.
“The callous act of deliberately ramming a boat full of hundreds of defenseless people is a crime that must not go unpunished. If the survivors’ accounts are indeed true — and they appear all too credible –- we are looking at what amounts to mass murder in the Mediterranean”, he said in a statement.
In what is one of the most lethal migrant shipwrecks officially on record, around 500 migrants, 100 of them thought to be children, had drowned after smugglers sank the ship they were travelling in last week. According to survivor reports, their ship was sank after Palestinian, Sudanese, Egyptian, Syrian and passengers of other nationalities refused to move to a smaller boat on their journey to Italy.
Only 11 people survived the attack, off the coast of Malta; some of them told the International Organization of Migration (IOM) that their ship was sunk intentionally by the smugglers, who they said were Egyptians and Palestinians.
“This is a truly horrendous incident”, Zeid said, adding that nations near the Mediterranean Sea had a duty “to clamp down on the smugglers who are exploiting one of the most vulnerable groups on the planet and endangering their lives, virtually on a daily basis, purely for financial gain”.
He added that countries worldwide need to find and punish the perpetrators as well as address to root cause of such incidents.
“Far too many refugees and migrants are dying all across the world in an effort to flee conflict, systematic political oppression and human rights violations, including economic deprivation”, Zeid, who took over from Navi Pillay as UN Human Rights chief earlier in the month, said.