The seemingly-plausible suspicion that the presence of NGO rescue boats are a 'pull-factor' for migrants to cross the Mediterranean has been repeatedly debunked.
Last year, the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell himself rejected the idea.
He said pull-factors were not supported by evidence, when the EU's operation Sophia was brought to an end over similar claims. "Every person interprets the world according to their own ideas. Me, I prefer to look at the figures," Borrell tol...
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Nikolaj Nielsen, an EUobserver journalist, is embedded on the Ocean Viking for the coming weeks, reporting exclusively from the boat on the Mediterranean migration route.