The managing director of SOS Humanity, Till Rummenhohl, comments on the discontinuation of financial support for civil search and rescue by the Federal Foreign Office and the media reuse of a false claim made by today’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul in 2023, in which he accuses non-governmental search and rescue organisations of enabling ‘smuggling gangs to do their business’: 

‘It is alarming and dangerous when false claims by leading German politicians, such as today’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, baselessly defame the life-saving work of civil society organisations. It has been scientifically proven several times that there is no connection between refugee movements and the presence of rescue ships in the Mediterranean. People flee across the Central Mediterranean because they have no alternative to escape war, violence, discrimination, lack of prospects and climate change in their countries of origin, as well as human rights violations and torture in Libya or Tunisia. The so-called ‘pull factor’ is a myth. Johann Wadephul’s statement made in 2023 that rescue organisations enable ‘smuggling gangs to do their business’ is fundamentally wrong. We provide humanitarian emergency aid strictly in accordance with international law and save human lives where European states fail to act. Exploitation and violence are rather the consequence of a lack of legal and safe migration routes to Europe. Such statements defame – contrary to all evidence – humanitarian aid and civil society, which has been committed to search and rescue and human rights at sea for ten years. Especially now, in times of the continued strengthening of right-wing extremism in Europe and Germany, we need a fact-based migration policy and rhetoric from all democratic parties that is not based on far-right narratives and promotes misrepresentation and emotionalisation.’

About the discontinuation of financial support by the Federal Foreign Office

‘As SOS Humanity, we are not surprised, but yet indignant that this already modest support of 2 million euros for search and rescue organisations per year has been prematurely cancelled by the new German federal government’, says Till Rummenhohl, managing director of SOS Humanity. ‘Thereby, the German government is ignoring a decision of the German federal parliament from 2022 that was agreed on for four years until 2026.  

This fits into the European trend to leave the duty to save lives at sea and protect refugees’ rights in the Central Mediterranean up to civil society. For ten years now, non-governmental organisations have been filling the rescue gap that European states left behind. More than 175,000 lives have been saved thanks to impressive efforts by European civil society with 21 emergency aid NGOs operating in the Central Mediterranean, 10 of which are from Germany. However, in the same period, more than 21,700 lives have been lost on this deadly migration route. What we witness is that people on the move are continuously left to die.  

The EU has been financing its closed-door policies by spending 242 million euros in ten years on the so-called Libyan and the Tunisian Coast Guards and Rescue Coordination Centres who systematically conduct illegal-pull backs and commit human rights violations. It is absurd that so much money is being spent on sealing-off Europe while so little money for the rescue of human beings is apparently still too much. 

What is now needed is a European search and rescue programme as well as safe and legal migration routes for people seeking protection.’