“They were seeking a future for their lives.” Pope Francis's prayer for the 170 migrants who died in the Mediterranean and for those responsible for this massacre.
At St Peter's Square, immediately after the Angelus, on Sunday 20 January, Pope Francis dedicated his prayer to what he described as "the two sorrows in my heart": Colombia, which on Thursday 17 January was plunged into fear following the explosion of a car bomb that killed 21 people and injured 68, and the Mediterranean Sea, where 170 migrants lost their lives over the course of the weekend.
I am thinking of the 170 victims of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. They were seeking a future for their lives. Victims, perhaps, of human traffickers. Let us pray for them and for those who bear responsibility for what has happened.
The Pope's words are deeply moving ("They were seeking a future for their lives"), yet at the same time very forceful, as they underline the fact that there are precise responsibilities for a massacre of this magnitude.
In the wake of the weekend massacre, 393 migrants were returned to Libya by the local coastguard. The Italian government expressed satisfaction at the success of the partnership, but the NGO Human Rights Watch responded by publishing, at precisely this moment, a report on the unsustainable abuses suffered by migrants in Libyan detention centres.
"Migrants and asylum seekers in Libya, including children, are trapped in a nightmare, and the work of the European Union only serves to perpetuate the detention system rather than freeing people from the abusive conditions in which they find themselves," states Judith Sunderland, associate director for Europe and Central Asia at Human Rights Watch, in a press release. "The few token efforts to improve things and release some people from detention do not absolve the EU of responsibility for enabling this barbaric system."