February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
In December 2001, eight people were found dead inside a container in County Wexford. Five other stowaways escaped suffocation.
The dead were four men, a woman and three children aged between 4 and 10.
All those who died were Kurdish Turks. An Albanian and an Algerian were among the survivors.
The group had thought they were going to a British port and would only be a few hours hidden but the journey to Wexford took five days.
The container had traveled from Milan to Cologne and then to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge before being put aboard a ship to Wexford via Cork.
The report said that innumerable others have drowned while fleeing from hardship, extreme poverty, discrimination and persecution.
It calls for those seeking international protection to be given the chance to lodge an asylum application at the first port of call in an effort to prevent such tragedies.
“In recent years the problem of stowaways has increased and it is generally recognized that there is an urgent need for an international agreement on the allocation of responsibilities to enable the successful resolution of stowaway cases,” the report says.
“More emphasis should be placed on preventive measures: ships should be thoroughly searched for stowaways on leaving high-risk ports and measures to prevent stowaways secreting themselves on board ought to be tightened.”
The report says highly organized international crime networks involved in trafficking people were shifting their operations from country to country to avoid improved immigration procedures.
They were paid several thousand euros to arrange journeys and sometimes also to provide false documents.
In some cases, stowaways had ended up traveling on ships for more than 100 days.
The report’s Italian author, Franco Danielli, said the problem of clandestine migrants appeared to be mainly restricted to ports in Ireland, Britain, Spain and Italy.
“There is a lack of clear rules applying to the access to the asylum procedure for sea stowaways, including as to the determination of the state responsible for processing their asylum application,” he said.
He called for special treatment for children and vulnerable cases like pregnant women, the sick and the elderly.