Commentary: Climate migration will worsen the brutality and chaos on the Mediterranean

In July 2018, an Italian-flagged oil supply ship called the Asso 28 that was crossing the Mediterranean Sea encountered a stalled rubber raft carrying 100 desperate migrants. Trying to make the dangerous journey from Libya to Europe, the migrants had reached international waters when the supply ship rescued them. But the ship’s captain opted not to take the migrants to a port of safety in Europe, as required by law, but back to a gulag of migrant detention facilities in Libya where the United Nations and others have documented systematic torture, rape, extortion, forced labor and death.

In October, the captain of that supply ship, Giuseppe Sotgiu, paid a heavy price for his decision: An Italian judge sentenced him to a year in prison for violating humanitarian law. The painful irony of this conviction is that Sotgiu will be jailed for what European Union officials have been doing on a far grander scale for several years