Ms Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui:

MSF, together with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, do not consider that Libya is currently a safe place of disembarkation. This has been said and repeated by a number of UN bodies. The High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressed his concerns about people being returned to Libya. We do not even want to open that discussion. The guidance from the UNHCR is extremely clear. One who would suggest that Libya is a safe place for migrant refugees and asylum seekers is either not reading the news or completely delusional.

I will give some more figures. The situation at sea is changing. NGOs currently are not present. There are other factors and it is difficult to attribute the cause of the increasing mortality rate to the presence or the lack of presence of NGOs. However, we have all been pushed out. This has been a campaign of more than a year that started with snide comments in the media about us colluding with traffickers, and then prosecutors in Italy announcing in the media that they were investigating us. It got to a point where MSF approached the various prosecutors mentioned in the media to tell them we were available to talk and to ask whether they had any questions but that is not the way to conduct an investigation.

Then there was the code of conduct that the Italians tried to push last year. After that, a few NGOs stopped being at sea. We had also a lot of judicial proceedings against different NGOs and boats being seized. There were four remaining. Today, none of us is there and we see an increase in the mortality rate.

We also see that the Libyan coastguard has intercepted at sea and returned to Libya 10,000 people this year. That may explain also the drop in 80% of arrivals to Italy. These people end up in the detention centres where we intervene and we see them. They end up with that cycle of abuse.

The UN, which is present in Libya, has a very limited capacity. Libya is not a state with strong institutions. The UNHCR is not necessarily welcome and the few evacuations that were mentioned that we were able to secure to Niger are a drop in the ocean. Those have been done after much negotiations.

The cost for NGOs, and certainly for MSF, is not about not being able to disembark in Italy and having to go to Valencia. It is about the fact that those are days when we will not be at sea conducting search and rescue. We can take the financial cost. This is not the issue. There is also the cost for the people who have been rescued. When the MS Aquariuswas stranded in the Mediterranean, we had people who had hardly escaped drowning at sea who had pulmonary problems and they were waiting on that boat not knowing whether they would be able to disembark. The weather conditions were really bad and a lady was trying to breast-feed her baby while throwing up. This is what not allowing us to disembark meant. For the people who have just been rescued, they should be able to disembark in the nearest safe port. This, until now, has been Italy. It is not only Italy's responsibility. We are not dogmatic about it. What we want to see is a place where the rights of people are upheld. We are not going to disembark people in a place where asylum seekers will not be able to seek asylum and where there will be no guarantees they will not be sent back to their country of origin.

This is the yardstick we apply.

I hope I have answered the Deputy's questions.