Just days after her party, Brothers of Italy, topped the results of the European Parliament elections in Italy on 9 June 2024, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni received a valuable gift from Tunisia. In fact, it was the third Tunisian gift in less than a year. The first gift was Tunisia’s signing, on 16 July 2023, of a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the European Union (EU) after much effort and pressure from Meloni. This agreement revolves around tackling informal migration, despite all the pleasantries and good intentions that appear in the other sections.

The second gift was the Tunisian authorities’ announcement at the beginning of this year that they had managed to prevent approximately 80,000 informal migrants from reaching Italy and Europe. These two gifts played an important role in increasing the political capital and popularity of Meloni and her far-right party during the European Parliament elections, which witnessed a clear rise of anti-migrant forces in several major European countries.

As for the third gift, which came on 19 June 2024, just days before the anniversary of the Memorandum of Understanding, it was Tunisia’s announcement of the establishment of a maritime search and rescue (SAR) region under its legal responsibility. This move fulfilled an old and insistent European – primarily Italian – demand. It was not the mere signing of a general relations protocol or declaration of intentions; rather, it brought significant responsibilities and issues.

The Announcement’s Legal Bases and Practical Implications

A maritime SAR region is an area over which a state is responsible but does not enjoy full national sovereignty or economic privileges. These regions are part of a plan established by the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (known as the Hamburg Convention), which entered into effect in 1985. This convention primarily aimed to ensure coordination between the various states and parties to rescue boats in distress anywhere in the world. It divided the world’s oceans into 13 SAR areas, each divided into regions of responsibility for each state bordering the sea. To ensure the plan’s success, the Maritime Safety Committee of the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization imposed a set of measures and conditions that all member states must respect when establishing an SAR region. Tunisia is the last state on the Central Mediterranean route to declare the borders of its region of responsibility, which – in reality – consists of the remaining area not already incorporated into the SAR regions of Italy, Malta, Libya, and Algeria. Tunisia’s tardiness in establishing its own region (the borders of which lie beyond its territorial waters and the adjacent area) was forcing the Italians, and to a lesser extent the Maltese, to intervene to search for and rescue distressed boats outside their own regions of responsibility.

Now, after the official declaration of the Tunisian SAR region, the state must comply with a set of measures whenever a boat within it is in danger. These measures include the following:

• Taking rapid action to rescue the boat and people in distress upon receiving notification from the boat or another state’s rescue coordination center.
• Establishing a national center and regional centers for coordinating SAR operations.
• Providing the necessary equipment for SAR, including speedboats, aircraft, and sophisticated radars.
• Providing first aid to people in distress and transporting them to safety.
• Receiving distress boats in national ports in emergencies.
• Coordinating with other states’ operations centers.

These obligations apply whether the boat is commercial, tourist, private, or used for smuggling informal migrants. The last group is the main target of SAR operations along the Central Mediterranean route, which is considered the world’s most dangerous informal migration route. In coming years, Tunisia will incur great expenses to fulfill its obligations, respond to calls by European states for rapid intervention and rescue operations dozens of miles off the Tunisian coast, and deal with the anarchy and the influence of militias in its neighbor Libya and the effects of this problem on the movement of informal migrants. The question remains: Why did the Tunisian state thrust itself into this predicament?

The Culmination of a Long Process (Chronology)

The delimitation of Tunisia’s SAR region was not a decision taken hastily. It was preceded by various steps, some dating back decades and others taken months earlier. Tunisia, which has been a member of the International Maritime Organization since 1963, ratified the 1974 International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea via Law no. 22 of 1980. It joined the 1988 protocol relating to this convention via Law no. 68 of 1988. It ratified the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea via Law no. 6 of 1985. Law no. 35 of 1998 authorized the Tunisian Republic to join the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue. Note that 1998 also witnessed the entry of the Tunisia-EU Association Agreement into effect and the signing of the first Tunisia-Italy security agreement on coordination and cooperation in combating informal migration. However, even though Tunisia had joined several international, regional, and bilateral agreements regarding sea and shipping laws, it continued to shirk delimiting an SAR region for which it would be responsible. There are several factors that allowed the Tunisian state to maneuver around and dodge the explicit obligation. These include: the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali regime’s intransigence, the overlap between its interests and the interests of major European countries, and the relatively limited scope of the informal migration phenomenon during the 1990s and early 2000s.

The 2011 revolution in Tunisia and [the outbreak of uprisings across] other Arab states was a turning point. Informal migration via the Mediterranean Sea changed in a qualitative and quantitative manner. Europe – and Italy in particular – became more insistent on the delimitation of Tunisia’s region of responsibility. As part of the effort to push European borders outward and outsource the guarding of these borders to southern countries, the EU began implementing several programs related to coastal surveillance and the interception of migrants’ boats in Tunisia – in “partnership” with the Tunisian state, of course. These included the establishment of the Integrated System for Maritime Surveillance (ISMariS) as part of the 2015-2018 Support Programme to Integrated Border Management in Tunisia, which was funded by the EU and Switzerland and supervised by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD, headquartered in Vienna). They also include the 2018 launch of the Border Management Programme for the Maghreb Region, which aims to improve Tunisian security agencies’ capacity to collect information through surveillance of the coasts and boats in the open ocean (search, rescue, and interception). The programme is funded by the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa and implemented by the ICMPD and the Italian Ministry of Interior.

On 18 February 2019, Government Order no. 144 of 2019 on Creating a Ministerial Committee and General Secretariat for Maritime Affairs was issued. From that period onwards, EU documents began to increasingly refer to the Tunisian region of responsibility. Sometimes, they mentioned it explicitly, as in the case of the December 2021 report about the forms of support that the European Commission had provided to Tunisia and Libya to strengthen their border management. At other times, the reference was implicit, as in the case of the documents related to the EU’s Neighbourhood, Development, and International Cooperation Instrument (NDICI) for the 2021-2027 period.

However, beginning in July 2023, the process accelerated. The EU-Tunisia Memorandum of Understanding signed on July 16 did not go into detail or mention the Tunisian SAR region explicitly, but there was a clear allusion to it in the section on mobility and migration: the parties “agree to work to further improve the coordination of search and rescue operations at sea and the implementation of effective measures to combat migrant smuggling and human trafficking”.

Several weeks after the agreement was signed, open talk about the region began. According to the Italian Nova News Agency, a meeting was held on 25 September 2023 between the permanent representatives of the EU and representatives of the European Commission to discuss steps to effectuate the Memorandum of Understanding. During the meeting, the representatives raised the issue of the establishment of the Tunisian SAR region and the forms of support that could be provided to Tunisia, such as assistance with establishing a center for coordinating SAR operations, preparing the center for integration into the network of similar Mediterranean centers, and providing reconditioned boats, spare parts, equipment, fuel, and technical monitoring. The Tunisian authorities did not comment openly on the content of these discussions and preferred to work in silence. Hence, during a ministerial meeting on 3 November 2023, a bill regulating SAR in the region of Tunisian responsibility was deliberated and approved. In the same month, two centers for training Tunisian security-force personnel from the various agencies concerned with border management and intercepting migrants were opened with funding from the German Federal Police and the ICMPD.

On 24 March 2024, the British Financial Times revealed the EU’s intention to allocate EUR165 million over three years to strengthen the Tunisian Coast Guard’s capacities and establish an academy to train the Tunisian National Guard under the supervision of the German Federal Police. Days later, on April 4, a Tunisian ministerial session approved a draft order regulating maritime SAR, which was promulgated in the Official Gazette a day later as Order no. 181 of 2024. The text’s most significant stipulations include “coordinating with other countries’ maritime SAR coordination centers” (Article 2), establishing a “national center for coordinating maritime SAR operations” (Article 4), the ability to make use of “foreign vessels and aircraft present in Tunisia’s SAR region of responsibility and capable of participating in maritime SAR operations via requisition” (Article 5), and “delimiting Tunisia’s region of responsibility and organizing the work of actors of the national maritime SAR system” (Article 7).

The pace then picked up. At the conclusion of the Safe Sea 24 SAR exercise (27-29 May 2024), Tunisia’s minister of defense stated that the goal of establishing a national maritime SAR system is to enhance the effectiveness of state intervention in order to provide SAR service for Tunisian and non-Tunisian sea users – especially Tunisian fishing boats, passenger transport vessels, commercial vessels, and leisure boats – in Tunisia’s area of responsibility. He emphasized that, with this step, the state is fulfilling its international obligations and commitments. This statement, which did not receive domestic attention, delighted officials on the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Italian Minister of Interior Matteo Piantedosi published a post on X (formerly Twitter) on June 1 praising Tunisia’s intention to establish its area of responsibility, deeming the decision “an important step forward in saving lives and controlling the flows of irregular migration”. Of course, the Tunisian announcement on June 19 signaled the end of the game of pressure and maneuvering, and the beginning of a new phase of Tunisia’s assumption of the burden of primarily European problems.

Who Will Search for and Rescue Tunisia’s Interests?

Instead of defending its priorities and interests, the Tunisian state is finding itself compelled – due partially to the international balance of power and partially to domestic policies – to harness human, logistic, and financial resources to alleviate the “burdens” on wealthy states and guard the borders of a fortress that has shut its gates to Tunisians and people from Africa and the Global South in general. It would have been better to defend Tunisia’s position in the Mediterranean Sea or at least improve the negotiating conditions. The Mediterranean is not just a crossing for informal migrants. It accounts for a significant portion of global trade movement and is brimming with natural resources, including the massive natural gas fields discovered in recent years. The various countries bordering this sea are waging “cold wars” to fortify their positions and expand their influence. Examples of this tension include the maritime border demarcation agreement signed between Libya and Turkey in November 2019, to which Greece and Egypt responded with an agreement designating an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the Eastern Mediterranean between the two countries in August 2020. A Lebanese-Cypriot process and an Italian-Maltese process are heading in the same direction, not to mention the Zionist entity’s practices and designs on the coasts of Palestine, Lebanon, and other countries.

Note that Tunisia signed maritime border demarcation agreements with Italy in 1971, Libya in 1989, and Algeria in 2011, and it attempted to secure a position in the open Mediterranean and benefit economically from the sea’s resources via Law no. 50 of 2005 on establishing an EEZ. The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines an EEZ as an area, extending up to 200 nautical miles from the outer limit of a state’s territorial sea, in which the state enjoys “sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources”, including via the “production of energy from the water, currents and winds”. However, this zone was not implemented and remained ink on paper. Today, it would have been better to negotiate over this zone before declaring the establishment of other zones from which the country has nothing to gain.

It is ironic that the establishment of Tunisia’s SAR region, which could lead the country to “rescue and intercept” tens of thousands of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa in the open sea, transport them to Tunisian soil, and accommodate them for an unknown period, is occurring at the same time as a campaign is occuring to demonize Tunisian activists in associations and organizations concerned with migrant issues and brand them traitors. Similarly, the move is at complete odds with the “national sovereignty” and “autonomous decision-making” themes dominating the discourse of President Kais Saied and his supporters. Over the past months, the Tunisia authorities have investigated dozens of activists and arrested and imprisoned some of them on charges of money laundering, facilitating the illegal entry of foreigners, and conspiring against state security. Meanwhile, websites and pages known for their support for the authority are systematically harassing every activist, researcher, and media figure who dares counter the racist, incitive anti-migrant discourse, accusing them of treason and espionage for foreign parties in service of schemes to “settle migrants” from Sub-Saharan Africa in Tunisia.

This article is an edited translation from Arabic.