Italy’s new globalist government has granted an NGO migrant ferry operating in the Mediterranean permission to offload 182 migrants in Sicily on Sunday.
The decision comes just days after Italian and Maltese coastguards picked up 73 migrants and brought them back to European shores over the weekend.
The Norwegian-flagged Ocean Viking, a migrant transport vessel operated jointly by the NGOs SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders, picked up a total of 217 people from four small boats in the central Mediterranean. The boats are said to have departed from Libya. 35 of the migrants were taken to Malta, but the Maltese government refused to take in the remaining 182 migrants, which were then taken to Italy.
On Twitter, SOS Mediterranee wrote, “The competent Italian authorities have assigned #Messina as place of safety for the 182 survivors on board the #OceanViking.”
This marks the second time in just one month that the new Italian government has allowed the Ocean Viking to dock and disembark migrants at its ports, Deutsche Welle reports.
The decision comes just ahead of a meeting in Malta on Monday where German, French, and Italian authorities will convene in an attempt to make a deal to manage the stand-offs which have occurred in the past year over migrants picked up in the Mediterranean.
The NGO migrant ferry is expected to arrive at the Sicilian port sometime Tuesday to offload the migrants. Most of the passengers aboard the ship are said to be sub-Saharan Africans.
6,570 migrants have arrived in Italy by sea so far this year, while 2,260 have landed in Malta, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Member states of the EU have yet to reach an agreement on a system that would see migrants distributed across the 28-nation bloc.
Many prominent EU politicians accuse the NGOs of working alongside human traffickers.
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