Meeting with “Stop Mare Mortum”

YEP has attend, during the last month of October, the meetings of the communication’s commission of the civic platform Stop Mare Mortum, which fights againts human rights violations, in order to understand how they work at Barcelona and to explain our experience.

Stop Mother Mortum comes after the death of around 900 people at the Italian coast on 19 April 2015. A group of young people did not want to let this news be forgotten. Thus was born Stopmm.

Its main task is to raise awareness, training of citizens and advocacy; they do through lectures, performances, meetings and policy proposals. We, representing YEP, have participated in the last performance held in Plaça Universitat de Barcelona on September 30, about 100 people attended.

stopmm

The purpose of this performance was reporting that there are deaths, every day, in the Mediterranean. During 2,016 have died, drowned, 4,220 people (data until November UNCHR). Indeed, this problem is one of the key objectives of Stopmm: they report this century genocide, as they explain at the platform. Stop Mare Mortun ask for “safe and legal ways” to prevent the trafficking of people who put their lives on risk at the sea.

They fight, on the other hand, for the compliance of human rights that are been violated in Europe. Everyone has the right to move between countries (Art. 13 HR) and there is also the right of asylum (Art. 14 HR); and it seems that refugees and / or migrants (the platform makes no distinction) don¡t have them, because they can not enter European territory.

They call on governments to open borders, they want stop FRONTEX. Stop Mother Mortum appeals to the public to take part themselves and mobilize to achieve fulfill all human rights. They want, in our case, that the Spanish and Catalan governments open their doors and welcome them (that is their right). Stopmm: wants to welcome people!

We (YeP) want to support the claims of this platform, their work for the non-violation of human rights of all migrants crossing the Mediterranean in search of a safe place to live. We think Stopmm does a good job to inform the public of the problem in order to raise awareness, which is also one of the objectives of the project YeP. Because of that, we share the work of these colleagues to show the reality and show that in Barcelona we can also work against this humanitarian crisis of the XXI century.