The initiative emerged from the "Watch The Med" project, which the activists Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller of "Forensic Oceanography" founded in 2012 to document escape stories and accidents in the Mediterranean.
[3] The Alarm Phone Initiative justifies its work stating that coast guards are said to have repeatedly ignored emergency calls in the past[1] and the intergovernmental cooperations Frontex and Triton did not practice sea rescue, but carried out military defensive actions.
[5] If, despite repeated reminders, the employees “have the feeling that they will not be rescued immediately”,[1] the Alarm Phone Initiative tries to put pressure on the coast guards and politicians with a message that is distributed via mailing lists.
[8] The activists had already asked in an open letter in April 2016 that all refugees be evacuated from Libya by ferry to Europe, where they should be granted unconditional protection without being subjected to an inhumane asylum procedure that has lost its original purpose and become only one another means of exclusion.
[1] On September 19, 2015, the Watch the Med Alarm Phone Initiative was awarded the Panter Prize [de] after a vote by the readers of the daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung (taz).