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General characteristics

This route refers to irregular migration coming from Northern Africa towards Italy and Malta across the Mediterranean Sea. Here, Libya often acts as nexus point where migrants from the Horn of Africa and Western African routes meet before embarking on their journey towards the EU. Until 2011, with its relatively prosperous economy, Libya offered good job opportunities for migrant workers from other African countries who either used it as a destination country or as a transit country where they could earn some money to pay smugglers for the last leg of their journey.

The migrants arriving in Italy and Malta mostly use wooden fishing boats which are often overcrowded and thus prone to sinking or capsizing in high-sea conditions and are often ill-equipped with poor engines and navigation systems; two factors contributing to the risk to life. As a result of these practices, tens of thousands of people become the subject of search-and-rescue (SAR) in the Mediterranean every year. Frontex operations took part in almost 900 SAR cases off Europe’s southern borders between 2011 and 2013, affecting almost 50,000 people in distress.

While most migrants using this route depart from Libya and land on Lampedusa or Sicily, others also arrive on the southern Italian coast, around Calabria and Puglia. These migrants arrive on boats from the Turkish coast, Greece or Egypt. The smugglers are of many different nationalities and use different types of boat, but the smugglers using fishing boats are most commonly Egyptian nationals.

Migratory trends

For years, this route has been an important entry point to the EU for irregular migrants and in 2008 nearly 40 000 migrants were detected, mostly near Lampedusa and Malta. Most migrants were nationals of Tunisia, Nigeria, Somalia and Eritrea. This traffic stopped almost completely however after the Italian government signed a bilateral agreement with Libya in 2009.

Civil unrest erupting in Tunisia and Libya in 2011 saw a massive spike in the number of migrants using this route (nearly 60 000 arrivals for the year). Between January and March only, some 20 000 Tunisians, mostly economic migrants heading mainly to France in search of job opportunities, arrived on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. These numbers were later reduced by 75% in the second quarter of the year as a result of an accelerated repatriation agreement between Italy and Tunisia. Between March and August 2011 however, exceptionally high numbers of sub-Saharan Africans departing from Libya arrived on Lampedusa and to a lesser degree on Sicily and Malta, many of whom were forcibly expelled by the Gaddafi regime and most of whom applied for asylum in Italy.

With the end of the Gaddafi regime in August 2011, the migratory pressure dropped off greatly and detections on this route in 2012 stood at approximately 10 000.

Between January and September 2013, more than 31 000 migrants had arrived in the EU using this route, mainly via Sicily and Lampedusa, but also, to a lesser extent, on the Coasts of Calabria, Puglia and Malta, which is also under increasing migratory pressure. The main nationalities include Eritreans, Somalis and other sub-Saharan Africans, as well as Syrian nationals. It is noteworthy that the migratory pressure over the summer months of 2013 was comparable to the same period in 2011.

Illegal border crossings on the Central Mediterranean route (including Puglia and Calabria) in numbers.

For more information on this and other migratory routes, see Frontex Risk Analysis reports http://www.frontex.europa.eu/publications/?c=risk-analysis