Criminal Justice (Smuggling of Persons) Bill 2021: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2021-10-20
============================================================

Lynn Ruane (IND), University of Dublin

I welcome back the Minister of State. I will be brief on these amendments. We covered them a lot on the previous Stage of the Bill. They go back to the recommendation IHREC made.
We spoke a great deal in the last session about the journey of a smuggled person and people obviously do not take that journey very lightly. The Journal reported a number of weeks ago that on 18 July people were pulled from the Mediterranean Sea and that there were 57 other migrants on the same boat when it had left its port. These amendments would seek to protect those humanitarians and aid workers who help to save those lives that we keep reading about and seeing the reported figures on.
Previously, this work was carried out by the European defence forces under Operation Sophia, with the assistance of some of our own ships given to those stranded at sea. Now that work is being left to NGOs such as Médecins sans Frontières, MSF, which we need to protect in this legislation. Under the current legislation, this work is in danger of ceasing because the NGOs are threatened with prosecution. I am therefore appealing to the Minister of State to accept these amendments to stop further loss of life and to be able to facilitate humanitarians in their very important work.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2021-10-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:43+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-10-20