The High-level Meeting to Address Unsafe Mixed Migration by Sea took place at the IMO last week, just a day after more than 100 refugees had been picked up by a laden VLCC in the Mediterranean, and at least ten dying in a separate incident. With all the relevant UN agencies represented (and at the hopsoped for “high-level”), this was an important meeting, not least because the situation at sea threatens almost certainly to get worse, rather than better, with a “tidal wave” of desperate people on the move.

It is a desperately important matter for merchant ships, which have played such a vital rescue role in 2014, with, said IMO Secretary-General Sekimizu, some 40,000 people saved by merchant ships out of the 200,000 rescued. Some 650 merchant ships have been actively involved and rescued migrants, countless others which will have diverted from their passages to help. Some 3500 of these migrants drowned, and that is only those whose fate is known. With the termination of the Mare Nostrum operation and the Italian Navy and Coastguard withdrawing their co-ordination facilities, the burden falls even more heavily on merchant ships in transit.

The meeting heard the most worrying forecasts of the numbers likely to put to sea this year, already borne out by desperate people in the hands of people smugglers trying to cross the sea in the first two months of this year. January and February saw 7,500 rescued and at least 370 deaths.

Speaking for the industry, ICS’s Peter Hinchcliffe suggested that between 400,000 and 450,000 people are likely to be encountered in the Mediterranean in 2015. Mr Sekimizu suggests that such numbers may see “every day, six merchant vessels being called upon to act, with each rescuing some 200 migrants”. It is an appalling prospect. What he called a forum of governments, UN agencies and industry was needed to take concerted action.

He suggested that an information sharing and communication system was needed to gather data on the developing situation, and in the short term, the development of “campaign material” that might raise awareness of the risks being run by people trusting their lives to unseaworthy craft arranged by migrant smugglers.

There appeared to be a reasonable appreciation of the “disproportionate” burden on the shipping industry and the need to support it. Compensation for costs run up by ships diverting, which might include reduced docking fees and practical measures to speed disembarkation of the rescued, were suggested.

It was noted that wrong assumptions were being made about the “pull factor” of the probability of rescue and fears about terrorists or criminals using such a route, when the most important factor was the human rights violations which were forcing people into these desperate means of escaping. It was emphasised that ships were honouring their obligations as to the rescue of people at sea – there was an onus on states to do the same, with more international assistance. But there are, in the short term, no easy answers.