An overloaded boat carrying
migrants sank in the Mediterranean
near
Greece. A Greek coast guard vessel accompanies the boat for hours,
but someone on the boat who had a satellite phone insisted that the
people on it did not want to be rescued, and eventually the coast guard
vessel went away.
Did the Greek vessel do something wrong? If so, what should it have done?
Some say it should have towed the boat to "safety". Does this mean
forcibly taking them to Greece? To Italy, where they wanted to go?
Would it have been safe to tow the overloaded boat? Would it have
been possible
to tow it, if the people on the boat tried to prevent
towing? Maybe they could have cast off the towing cable or cut it.
I wonder if the boat had an actual crew, and not only passengers.
Sometimes smugglers conscript one or more passengers
to "run the boat", which (not being sailors) they can do only in easy circumstances.
Sometimes that conscript gets charged as a conspirator
in the crime of "people smuggling" even though perse was not given a choice.
But this was
a bigger boat than usual, and maybe it had a real crew. If so, maybe
the person with a satellite phone was one of them. Maybe
the passengers would have been happy to land safely in Greece.