The number of migrants arriving Cyprus has fallen massively over the past three years after tough measures from the government.
A Syrian man has been jailed for three years by a Cyprus court for causing the death by negligence of a 3-year-old girl who died of dehydration aboard an overloaded migrant boat.
The Famagusta criminal court ruled that the 48-year-old captain had failed to ensure the safety of the 60 Syrian migrants in January last year during a journey on the small wooden craft, which carried no navigational aids or appropriate communications equipment.
The captain had told the passengers at some point in the journey to throw any remaining bottles of water overboard in a bid to remove any indications that the boat had departed from Lebanon, the Attorney-General’s Office in Cyprus said on Friday.
The boat set sail on 18 January 2024, but an engine failure left the vessel adrift for nearly a week in the eastern Mediterranean, where many of the passengers began to drink sea water and their own urine to quench their thirst, according to the facts of the case.
After locating the boat, Cypriot authorities airlifted the 3-year-old girl, who was accompanied by her mother, to a hospital, but medical staff could not save her life.
The authorities did not name the perpetrator or the victim.
The number of migrants arriving in Cyprus has fallen massively over the past three years after tough measures from the government. Authorities said the EU member nation’s ability to host many thousands of new asylum seekers was being overwhelmed.
Migrant arrivals to ethnically divided Cyprus — mostly through the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north, where government authorities cannot exercise jurisdiction — dropped from 17,278 in 2022 to 6,102 in 2024, according to the latest available government data.
Meanwhile, asylum applications plummeted from a record 21,565 to 6,769 over the same period while repatriations increased to nearly 11,000 from 7,700.
Following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria in December, Cyprus’ Deputy Migration Minister Nicholas Ioannides said about 40 Syrian nationals on average each day are requesting to either withdraw their asylum application or to revoke their international protection status.
Ioannides said this week that some 755 Syrians have already returned to their homeland.
Cyprus lies closer to the Middle East than any other EU state, and thousands of Syrians have fled to the island in recent years, which last year caused the government to halt the processing of asylum applications altogether.
Last October, Europe’s top human rights court ruled that Cyprus breached the right of two Syrian nationals to seek asylum after keeping them, and more than two dozen other people, aboard a boat at sea for two days before sending them back to Lebanon.
Additional sources • AP
