A court in Cyprus sentenced a Syrian man to three years in prison after he was found guilty of negligent manslaughter for the dehydration death of a 3-year-old girl on an overloaded migrant boat. The vessel was adrift for six days without sufficient food or water supplies. The Attorney-General’s Office stated that the Famagusta criminal court determined that the 48-year-old captain failed in his responsibility to ensure the safety of the 60 Syrian migrants aboard the small wooden boat, which lacked navigational instruments and proper communication tools.
During the voyage, the captain reportedly instructed the passengers to discard any remaining water bottles overboard to conceal their departure from Lebanon. The boat embarked on its journey on January 18, 2024, but an engine failure resulted in the craft drifting for almost a week in the eastern Mediterranean. Many passengers resorted to drinking seawater and their urine out of desperation for hydration.
Cypriot authorities eventually located the vessel and airlifted the little girl, who was with her mother, to a hospital. Unfortunately, medical personnel were unable to save her life. Over the past three years, the number of migrants arriving in Cyprus has significantly decreased following a series of stringent measures implemented by the EU member government. Officials have expressed concerns that the country’s capacity to accommodate an influx of asylum seekers has been overwhelmed.
Recent government statistics indicated that migrant arrivals to the divided island of Cyprus—primarily through the breakaway Turkish Cypriot region, where local authorities cannot enforce jurisdiction—plummeted from 17,278 in 2022 to just 6,102 in 2024. In a similar vein, asylum applications fell from a peak of 21,565 to 6,769 during the same timeframe, while repatriations rose sharply from 7,700 to close to 11,000.
In light of the recent fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad, Deputy Minister for Migration Nicholas Ioannides noted that an average of 40 Syrian nationals have recently requested to withdraw their asylum applications or to cancel their international protection status. He further reported that approximately 755 Syrians have already returned to their home country. Despite this, Cyprus has faced criticism for its treatment of migrants’ human rights at sea. Last October, Europe’s leading human rights court determined that Cyprus violated the asylum rights of two Syrian nationals by keeping them, along with more than twenty others, stranded on a boat for two days before returning them to Lebanon.
