These are the words with which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, welcomed the Chief of Staff of the Navy, admiral of the team Giuseppe De Giorgi, arrived Tuesday at the UNHCR building (the agency for United Nations refugees) in Geneva, following the invitation to the round table "Protection at Sea", in the context of the Dialogue 2014, the seventh edition of an initiative, created to foster confrontation and international debate on increasingly urgent subjects and current concerning the protection and protection of people at sea.
Many prominent participants in this edition, including Peter Sutherland, Special Representative of the UN General Secretariat for Migration and International Development, Laurent Muschel, Head of the Migration and Asylum Unit of the Directorate General for Internal Affairs of the European Union , Mohammed Dayri, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Libya, Vincent Cochetel, Director of the European Regional Office.
"Many of those who cross the Mediterranean - explained Admiral De Giorgi to over 400 delegates from all over the world, to representatives of the European Union, NGOs and associations fighting for the defense of refugee rights - come crammed into overcrowded boats behind the «mother ships» and subsequently abandoned many miles away from the coast where they sink or are saved. Our Navy - the admiral continued - has saved more than 160.000, between October of the 2013 and today. Now the operation has passed into the hands of the European Union, but the Armed Force will not stop directing its efforts in saving lives at sea, in ensuring the safety of those who sail and fight all forms of illicit trafficking. The Mediterranean - he concluded - should not become a sea of death ".
Attention to the experience of Mare Nostrum, bestowed by the interventions and applause of all the delegates of the round table, testifying to an all-Italian ability to have implemented a model that now many are asking to export more wide, nationally and internationally, in other seas of the planet, scourged by the deaths of so many people who leave their land, in search of survival and a hope of future for themselves and their loved ones, like the Ocean.
"There are more than 380.00 people, those at least we have met, without counting those who disappear without anyone knowing anything, that every year in the world flee from situations of danger, such as wars, hunger, famine and denial of basic rights of ' human being. Whole families in search of a hope for a human life worthy of the name "said the High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, recognizing Italy's ability to have been able to translate into concrete actions and a mission exceptional need for help from thousands of people.
A participation, this of the Navy to the 2014 Dialogue, that has seen her protagonist and guest of a three days of events connected to the themes of migrations by sea. The "Sea Change", a meeting organized in the UN agency building on Tuesday evening 9 December by the Permanent Representation of Italy at UNHCR, the Permanent Representation of the Holy See and ICMC (International Catholic Organization for Migration) ), in which the screening of the docufiction "La Scelta di Catia" produced by Marina Militare, RAI and Corriere della Sera and presented by Rear Admiral Nicola De Felice was the subject of a very long and moved applause of a hall full of representatives of the delegations, civil organizations and young students from various countries.
Great success, at the end of the plenary session of "Protection at Sea" on Wednesday 10, the inauguration of the photographic exhibition dedicated to Mare Nostrum, set up in a large area of the foyer of the UNHCR Palace and held at the baptism by the same UN High Representative for the Refugees Antonio Guterres, with the Ambassador of the Italian Representative Maurizio Serra and Admiral De Felice, who symbolically opened the doors to a gallery of touching and vivid images, made during Operation Mare Nostrum, through the eye of the well-known photographer Massimo Sestini.
Source: Military Navy
