sleerp

Because war is shit. Have you ever been in a war? It's easy enough talk about how others should stay behind and fight when you speaking from the comforts of your own home.

And then theres the question of who or what do you fight for, this isn't a simple case of fighting for the rebels or fighting for the state. The rebels are fragmented to the point where there isn't really much of a chance for an organised government to rise from the ashes. You've got dozens of militia each with different goals or religious ideology. Joining the rebel side means you end up in a meat grinder. Join Assad's forces, prop up a totalitarian state and ignore all his past deeds? Join ISIS and chop off a few heads? The Kurds, who have their own motive of not the freedom of the Syrian People, but their own independence.

There is no viable opposition, which means its a meat grinder. You can't expect someone to give up their lives for this.

how often do you drink it. Do you think you'll get diabetes

Yeah, I didn't see the key point of purposely avoiding the processing procedures and I was more focused on your question of what permissive rule did MOAS act under.

If that really is the case then I'm sure they will be in violation of a prohibitive rule in domestic law (illegal immigration), although I don't know enough about this to comment, nor is my specialty in Italy's immigration law.

But yeah rescuing and bringing rescued refugees into Europe per se isn't prohibited (there may also be permissive rules out there) if the correct process is complied with. State practice and opinio juris is of course to bring the rescued to the closest safe port (also embodied in the Search and Rescue convention)

In response to your edit, many of the obligations in these types of international treaties are ratified and incorporated into domestic law, making it an obligation which the ship will have depending on their flag state. It may also be within customary international law (with the advent of the treaties one would expect opinio juris and state practice to align), I'm don't know enough details as to MOAS's nationality or registration so I can't tell whether those obligations apply. But then again there is the lotus principle.

Also related to your edit is that if Italy accepted the refugees, they can't send them back to the country they came from (humanitarian crisis and all) - 1951 Refugees Convention

I'd love to see the link (I can't seem to view it) since one would assume Italy would have done something if MOAS was purposely avoiding processing centres.

You are missing the point, in international law there isn't a need to find a permissive rule. Anything that isn't prohibited is permitted - Lotus Case. The point is that the onus is on you to find something that prohibits them from rescuing people and leaving them at the closest and safest possible port. You can call it facilitating illegal immigration (you also need to prove this), others however call it search and rescue.

Now leaving the refugees in Europe is a different matter. But it is up to the destination states to decide whether that is illegal. I highly doubt these states consider rescuing refugees to be facilitating illegal immigration, if they did they would have ample chances to arrest Martin. Which they haven't done so.

Which brings us back to the main point here, an actor does not need to find a permissive rule for their actions. They are free to act so long as there is no prohibitive rule. Call it freedom, call it the lotus principle, call it the third source, these incorporate the fundamental ideas of not just international law, but also almost every other areas of law.

Edit: bolding for the key points since i don't like TL;DR's because my thing isn't too long