A New Record For Africans Risking Boat Route to Europe
A migrant waits at a Red Cross tent in Tenerife after his boat was intercepted off the Canary Islands.
(By Arturo Rodriguez -- Associated Press)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
Monday, September 4, 2006
MADRID, Sept. 3 -- Police caught nearly 1,200 people trying to reach the Canary Islands in overcrowded boats that set out from the West African country of Mauritania, setting a record for a weekend, officials said Sunday.
At least 12 boats reached the islands in the span of 36 hours, Civil Guard officials said. All the migrants, including children, were in good health, they said. At least 674 people arrived Saturday, and 522 reached shore Sunday.
With routes through Morocco being gradually sealed, the rising wave of African migration to Europe has been pushed hundreds of miles south, forcing many to make a perilous voyage in open boats to Spain's Canary Islands, their gateway to the prosperous European Union.
More than 20,000 Africans have been intercepted so far this year in the archipelago, and the total for August was around 6,000 compared with 4,751 for all of last year, according to Spanish authorities.
Spain has asked the E.U., the United Nations and the international community to assist with the situation.
Spain's deputy prime minister, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, traveled to Brussels last week to press E.U. officials for more help and express Spanish frustration with an E.U. plan to monitor African waters from the air and sea. It was approved in May but has yet to begin in earnest.
The Spanish government said Friday that it was organizing a conference of southern European countries to seek a joint response to the crisis.
The ministers will talk about issues such as coastal surveillance, rescue operations and repatriation, and plan to have a proposal ready for a summit of E.U. leaders in December.
The vast majority of African migrants to the Canary Islands pack into narrow, open boats that sometimes take weeks to make the dangerous voyage. Thousands more are believed to die in the choppy seas.
Those who make it are kept in holding centers, and authorities have 40 days to repatriate them before they must release them. The migrants are either sent back to their country of origin or to the country from which they set out, if Spain has repatriation accords with that country.
