Code of Conduct

The NGO Code of Conduct

Officially, the Code was presented as an instrument to bring order to sea rescue. In practice, it aimed to severely curtail the operational capacity of NGOs and fold them into the logic of state border enforcement. Those who did not sign were to be pushed out of the operational area: by overstretching their already limited resources, or through legal sanctions, up to and including the denial of access to Italian ports.

The Code's central function was political and narrative. It lent institutional weight and legitimacy to the suspicion narrative, NGOs as accomplices of smugglers, after prosecutors, Frontex and right-wing media had spent months building it. On one level, it provided the pretext for repression. On another, it was meant to reshape the conditions at sea so that the so-called Libyan Coast Guard would be elevated to a legitimate authority, empowered to enforce the pushback-by-proxy regime on which the Italy-Libya deal rested.

The Code's provisions were not bureaucratic formalities. Each one was an instrument, aimed at a load-bearing pillar of the civilian rescue structure.

Ban on transfers between NGO vessels without MRCC approval. The efficiency of the civilian rescue fleet rested on coordination and division of labour. Smaller first-responder ships like the Iuventa distributed life jackets, provided first aid and took people on board temporarily to stabilise the situation until larger vessels could carry out the actual evacuation to a safe port. The ban on transfers between NGOs without prior MRCC approval broke this chain. Each ship was now to bring survivors ashore in Italy itself, regardless of capacity or proximity to further distress cases. Fewer ships in the rescue zone, fewer people reached, longer intervals between rescues.

Compulsory police presence on board. NGOs were to take Italian law enforcement officers on board, ostensibly to secure evidence against smugglers, in practice to keep crews under permanent surveillance and fold them into police operations. The officers were to be able to document, or prevent, alleged facilitation. The provision turned humanitarian crews into potential suspects and was meant to force their cooperation with criminal proceedings whose primary aim was to identify boat drivers and prosecute them as smugglers.

Restricted access to Libyan waters. NGOs were only allowed to operate in the SAR zone declared by Libya with explicit permission, and had to follow the instructions of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard. Rescues within Libya's 12-nautical-mile zone were rare anyway, armed militias made them dangerous. But they did happen, in cases of imminent shipwreck, when minutes decided whether people lived or drowned. Under the Code of Conduct, those decisions would no longer rest with the crews on scene. They were to rest with the so-called Libyan Coast Guard: militias relabelled as a legitimate authority, trained and financed by Italy and the EU, in some cases operators of the very smuggling networks they were mandated to dismantle.

Transparency requirements. NGOs were to disclose finances, communications and organisational structures. In practical terms, the provision was barely justifiable, NGOs were already subject to extensive legal oversight. Its function was narrative: to keep alive the insinuation that organisations refusing full state scrutiny must have something to hide, and to generate material that could be used selectively in ongoing criminal proceedings.

Compulsory cooperation with the Italian MRCC. All operations were to be conducted strictly on the orders of the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre. Independent decisions at sea, often the difference between reaching a distress case in time or not, were effectively forbidden. Combined with the transfer ban, this provision centralised operational control in Rome, hundreds of kilometres from the actual conditions at sea.

Sanctions. NGOs that did not sign were denied access to Italian ports, and with it excluded from the operational area altogether. The Code was not formally binding. It did not need to be. Several major NGOs refused to sign.

Minniti was the architect, but he did not work alone. The Code was the product of a political consensus across party lines and national borders, held together by different interests converging on the same outcome.

At EU level, the Commission backed the Code as a pragmatic instrument of order, giving Minniti the institutional cover he needed. The Justice and Home Affairs Council supported it. Germany and France, despite occasional reservations in tone, did not stand in its way. The Code was not an Italian aberration. It was an EU solution in Italian clothes.

The ideological infrastructure had been built over years. Frontex had supplied the analytical framework, warning in 2016 reports of uncontrolled NGO activity in language that flowed directly into political debate. Right-wing think tanks, had spread the pull-factor narrative and the framing of NGOs as smugglers' accomplices through policy papers and media placements. By 2017, what had begun as a fringe accusation had become the common sense of European migration policy.

What Minniti understood, and what the Code operationalised: you did not need to ban rescue. You needed to make it impossible, legally, logistically and politically, while keeping up the appearance of order and humanitarian concern. The Code became the blueprint for every subsequent attempt to obstruct the civil fleet, to slow it down, and to render rescue impossible.