Frontex | Central Mediterranean route

General characteristics

This route refers to the migratory flow coming from Northern Africa towards Italy and Malta through the Mediterranean Sea. Here, Libya often acts as nexus point where migrants from the Horn of Africa and Western African routes meet before embarking on their journey towards the EU. Until 2010, with its relatively prosperous economy, Libya offered good job opportunities for migrant workers from African countries who either used it as a final destination or as a transit country where they could earn money to pay the smugglers for the last leg of their journey to the European Union.

People smugglers put the migrants heading for Italy and Malta on old, unseaworthy fishing boats or even small rubber dinghies which are much overloaded and thus prone to capsizing. These vessels are typically equipped with poor engines, lack proper navigation systems and often have insufficient fuel to reach Europe - all factors which put migrants’ lives at serious risk. In fact, in 2014 the vast majority of border control operations in Central Mediterranean turned into Search and Rescue (SAR) operations.

Migratory trends

For years, this route has been an important entry point for irregular migrants to the EU, and in 2008, nearly 40 000 of them were detected, mostly near Lampedusa and Malta. These were mainly nationals from Tunisia, Nigeria, Somalia and Eritrea. However, this movement stopped almost completely in 2009 after the Italian government signed a bilateral agreement with Libya.

This changed in 2011, when the eruption of civil unrest in Tunisia and Libya in 2011 created a massive spike in the number of migrants to more than 64 000 along this route. From January to March alone, more than 20 000 Tunisians arrived on the small Italian island of Lampedusa. They were mainly economic migrants whose intention was to reach France in search of job opportunities. These numbers dropped 75% in the second quarter of the year as a result of an accelerated repatriation agreement signed between Italy and Tunisia. Between March and August 2011, however, more than 40 000 sub-Saharan Africans arrived in Lampedusa and, to a smaller degree, in Sicily and Malta. Many were forcibly expelled by the Gaddafi regime. Most of these migrants applied for asylum in Italy.

With the collapse of the Gaddafi regime in August of 2011, the migratory pressure dropped almost entirely, and detections in 2012 remained very low. But the following year saw a second peak in the departures from Libya. The dramatic conditions of the overcrowded boats used by the migrants were particularly visible in October 2013, when 366 migrants lost their lives near Lampedusa when their boat suddenly capsized.

In 2014, detections in the Central Mediterranean area reached a staggering level. More than 170 000 migrants arrived in Italy alone, representing the largest influx into one country in European Union history. Many migrants departed from Libya, where the lack of rule of law and basic law enforcement allow smuggling networks to thrive. Syrians and Eritreans were the top two nationalities, but numerous Africans coming from Sub-Saharan regions also use this route.

The increasing number of migrants departing from Northern Africa also led to an increase in the number of people who perished at sea. According to UNHCR, in 2014 some 3 500 migrants lost their lives while crossing the Mediterranean.

Illegal border crossings on the Central Mediterranean route (including Apulia and Calabria) in numbers.

As of October 2014, the data for the the Central Mediterranean route include the data for the Apulia and Calabria route. Indeed many migrants are disembarked in Apulia and Calabria even though they have been detected in the Central Mediterranean area. However, the current reporting mechanism does not break down by areas of detections, but by areas of disembarkation, thus a distinction of detections between these two routes is not available.

For more information on this and other migratory routes, see Frontex Risk Analysis reports.