Over 45,000 migrants risked their lives trying to reach Italy and Malta

More than 45,000 migrants risked their lives at sea in the Mediterranean to reach Italy and Malta in 2013. More than 42,900 landed in Italy, 2,800 landed in Malta. These arrivals are the highest in numbers since 2008 (exception made for 2011, the year of the Libyan crisis). Out of those arrived in Italy more than 5,400 were women and 8,300 were minors (5,200 unaccompanied).

Most of the landings took place in Lampedusa (14,700) and along the coast around Syracuse (14,300).   

"This year immigration trend towards the Southern shores of Italy tells that there has been an increase in the number of people escaping from war and regimes," José Angel Oropeza, Director of the IOM Coordinating office for the Mediterranean, said.

"The majority of the migrants arrived from Syria (11,300), Eritrea (9,800) and Somalia (3,200). All those people were forced to leave their countries and they have the right to receive protection according to the Italian law."

Landings are continuing in January 2014: just today, 204 migrants rescued by the Italian Navy in the Strait of Sicily will arrive in Augusta, close to Syracuse.

"The real emergency in the Mediterranean is represented by those migrants who continue to lose their lives at sea. They disappear and their loss simply remain unknown. The identification of the cadavers is still a humanitarian issue to be resolved: numerous relatives of the victims are waiting to know if their loved ones are among the bodies collected after October's shipwrecks."

More than 20,000 people died in the last twenty years trying to reach the Italian coasts. 2,300 in 2011, and around 700 in 2013. "Too many deaths, too many hopes lost in the sea dividing North Africa and Europe," Oropeza said.

"During these years we became used to see the victims of these escapes from war, persecution, poverty and hunger, and these individual and collective tragedies turned into a mere calculation, often "muffled" by the statistics and the news. The urgency is to understand how to stop people from dying while they try to achieve better life conditions, and how to make migration safe, turning a forced decision into a choice."