- Date of Incident
- 02 Aug 2017
- Location
- Mediterranean Sea
- Publication Date
- 20 Apr 2018
- Commissioned By
- Self-Initiated
- Additional Funding
- Open Society Foundations (OSF), Republic and Canton of Geneva, Borderline Europe, Transmediale, WatchTheMed Platform
- Collaborators
- Borderline Europe, Transmediale, Jugend Rettet e.V., WatchTheMed Platform
- Methodologies
- Fluid Dynamics, Synchronisation, Remote Sensing
- Forums
- Presented to Italy's Supreme Court
- Exhibitions
- Counter Investigations, The Value of Freedom, Forensic Justice, Broken Nature, Liquid Violence at Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2019, The Crime of Rescue – The Iuventa Case at Santarcangelo Festival 2019, Liquid Violence at Manifesta 12, Violence, Fast and Slow, 05786 at La Artificialidad del Límite, Framing - Medien Macht Bilder, Forensic Architecture: True to Scale, Forensic Oceanography at Our Present, Forensic Oceanography at Sea Around Us, Liquid Violence at Short Festival, Forensic Architecture: To Pattern the Bruised Information, Forensic Architecture: Witnesses, Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design
On 2 August 2017, the ship Iuventa was seized by the Italian judiciary. Its operators, members of the German NGO Jugend Rettet (‘Youth Rescue’), were accused of colluding with smugglers and ‘assistance with illegal migration’. The charges related to three different rescue operations: the first on the 10 September 2016, the second and third on 18 June 2017.
The accusations came only days after Jugend Rettet, along with several other rescue NGOs, had refused to sign a ‘code of conduct’ that would have substantially limited their activities.
Forensic Architecture (FA) and Forensic Oceanography (FO) worked together to examine the accounts of those events presented by Italian authorities.
Our analysis suggests that the Iuventa crew did not return empty boats to smugglers, as they were accused of having done. Nor do they appear to communicate with anyone potentially connected with smuggling networks, as the Italian authorities suggested they had.
The seizure of the Iuventa is emblematic of a new attempt by European authorities to stem the flow of migration across the Mediterranean, following the failure of the policies initially deployed in 2011 following the Arab Spring, when the number of attempted crossings from North Africa began to increase substantially.
From 2016, the Italian government, in collaboration with other European governments and EU agencies, has deployed a two-pronged strategy to close off the central Mediterranean. On one hand, authorities attempt to delegitimise and criminalise rescue NGOs, aiming to prevent them from operating in the central Mediterranean. On the other, those authorities provide material, technical and political support to Libya’s coastguard, encouraging and enabling them to more effectively intercept and ‘pull back’ migrants to the Libyan coast.
