Catholic church agrees to take in 100 migrants stuck on Italian coast guard ship 10 days

Reporting from Rome —  The Italian premier says the Italian Catholic Church will take most of the 140 migrants who have been stuck aboard an Italian coast guard ship for days, thus ending a standoff between Italy and the European Union over the migrants’ fate.

The office of Premier Giuseppe Conte quoted him as saying Saturday night that the Italian bishop’s conference will take 100 of the migrants and Albania and Ireland will take 20 each.

Fifty others of the 190 people rescued at sea on Aug. 16 by the Italian coast guard were previously left off the ship, many for health reasons. Most of the migrants are from Eritrea.

Conte also expressed his displeasure that more EU nations didn’t offer to take in the migrants. He said Italy wouldn’t approve the EU’s multi-year budget unless policy toward migrants changed.

Concerns had been mounting earlier Saturday about the medical and psychological health of the migrants who were spending their 10th day stuck aboard the coast guard ship while the Italian government insisted that other European Union nations must take them.

The health minister requested an onboard visit by doctors to the Diciotti coast guard ship, which is docked in Catania, in Sicily. After it was done, authorities decided that 16 migrants should be taken off the ship for medical reasons, two of them for suspected cases of tuberculosis and three for pneumonia, Red Cross officials said.

The standoff prompted an impassioned appeal by the U.N. refugee agency’s chief, asking Italy to let them disembark and urging EU countries to take responsibility for the asylum seekers, most of them young men fleeing harsh conditions in Eritrea.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, speaking in Geneva, said before Conte’s announcement that it’s time to end a “race to the bottom on who can take the least responsibility for people rescued at sea.”

He urged European countries “to do the right thing and offer places of asylum for people rescued from the Mediterranean Sea in their time of need.”

But Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been adamant that the migrants be kept on the ship until fellow EU nations pledge to take them.

On Saturday, Italian state TV said Salvini is being investigated for his role in forbidding migrants rescued at sea to disembark in Italy.

Salvini indirectly confirmed the report Saturday night, tweeting that a Sicilian prosecutor asked him for his personal data and that “if he wants to interrogate me or even arrest me because I defend the borders and security of my country, I’m proud.”

Salvini, who leads the anti-migrant League party, has said he’s ready to defend his reasons for ordering the migrants kept aboard.

“If someone wants to investigate me, investigate me,” Salvini tweeted.

Also Saturday, a local Italian Red Cross official, Stefano Principato, told reporters that Italy’s health minister ordered an inspection of sanitary conditions for the migrants, who have been sleeping on the ship’s deck and coping since Aug. 16 with a baking sun and limited toilet facilities.

On Friday, many of them refused their meals in a sign of frustration for not being allowed off the ship. But on Saturday, migrants could be seen taking their lunch, given to them by some of the Diciotti’s 40 crew members.

Doctors have said many of the migrants on the ship have scabies, but “more than a health emergency, it would be better to speak of a psychological emergency,” Principato said.

Many of the migrants, including 27 unaccompanied minors who were allowed to disembark earlier in the week, have told Italian authorities they endured beatings and other cruelties while in Libyan detention facilities for months or even years, waiting to leave in human traffickers’ unseaworthy boats toward Europe.

UPDATES:

4 p.m.: This article was updated to report that the Italian Catholic Church, Ireland and Albania agreed to take in migrants who had been rescued in the Mediterranean Sea by the Italian coast guard.

This article was originally published at 11 a.m.