Dear Friends,
The Watch The Med Alarm Phone is a 'hotline' for people in distress at sea. The hotline will run 24/7 and will immediately raise alarm when refugees and migrants get into situations of distress at sea and are not promptly rescued. It will be managed by human rights activists from both sides of the Mediterranean and offer a multilingual team that will first advise all persons in distress to alert the officially responsible rescue teams. The Watch The Med Alarm Phone does not possess rescue-teams and we cannot offer direct protection. When a distress call is received, we will call the coast guards ourselves, and follow up on their response, making known to them that we are informed and 'watching' them. If they fail to respond, we will gather all imaginable political and public pressure to force them to do so.
Below you will find the links to the multi-lingual calls as well as a first poster of the project "Watch The Med Alarm Phone". We were able to gain the backing of a considerable number of supporters, including
well-known people, in different countries so that the transnational character of the project is emphasised. We will call for more signatures until at least the 5th of October in order to make the alarm-phone
further known in social movements and to thereby also safeguard the project politically. On or around the 5th of October small actions are planned to gain more publicity and we then also seek to increase our visibility in public and in the media.
With respect to practical-technical matters, the project is in a testing phase at the moment with multi-lingual shift-teams working in different cities. As announced in the call, the alarm-phone will be activated as
of the 10th of October and we will then circulate the number through our contacts in the migrant- and refugee communities in important transit-countries. As of that moment we will expect the first calls from
boatpeople in distress at sea, particularly as all political developments suggest that shipwrecks will increase at the southern edge of fortress Europe.
And we repeat: the project looks for and needs further contributors on all practical levels, from technical assistance, documentation and translation, to phone shift work. In order to learn more about the project please write to the following address: [log in to unmask]
The call with all signatures (until 24th of September): http://www.watchthemed.net/index.php/page/index/12
The call in the different languages:
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-Call-english.pdf
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-Appel-francais.pdf
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-Appel-arab.pdf
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-Call-greek.pdf
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-Appello-italiano.pdf
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-llamamiento-espanol.pdf
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Alarmphone-Aufruf-deutsch.pdf
The first poster:
http://www.watchthemed.net/media/uploads/page/12/Poster%20Alarm%20Phone.pdf
All the best,
Marion (Welcome to Europe)
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