Reuters
| publié le 13 juin 2007 |
The tiny Mediterranean island says it cannot cope and wants the EU’s 27 countries to share out those picked up outside the bloc’s waters, in particular near Libya, according to the size of each EU state.
"The situation right now is just a complete mess, it’s a free for all," Maltese Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg told reporters at a meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg. "Everyone is leaving from two ports in Libya and each year 600 immigrants are dying — this is a very conservative estimate — on the threshold of Europe." He said Malta had saved 250 people in the past 10 to 15 days. "There is general willingness to accept there are shared responsibilities," German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said at the end of the meeting.
Diplomats will discuss if those responsibilities could mean financial assistance or taking people in. Many doubted there could be a deal on sharing out migrants intercepted at sea.
"It seems very difficult. I do not see, technically, how we could do that," the French minister for immigration and national identity, Brice Hortefeux, told reporters. "There often are political commitments to help but when the time comes to concretely do something nobody’s there," an EU diplomat said.
Governments offered more boats and helicopters to Malta but the diplomat said only 10 percent of the boats and helicopters promised to the EU’s border agency for its operations had been freed up.
The meeting in Luxembourg followed criticism of Malta for refusing to accept 27 people who spent three days clinging to fishing nets while it argued with Libya over who should rescue them. They were eventually picked up by the Italian navy.
Diplomats said a number of countries fear that a deal on sharing out those picked up at sea would encourage would-be migrants to make the dangerous trip in search of a job. "I do not see how we can share out illegal migrants. It would give a bad signal to say ’you can come, we will save you, we will distribute you among ourselves", a spokesman for the EU commissioner for migration, Franco Frattini, said on Monday.
Malta and the European Commission want EU-wide guidelines on who is responsible for saving people at sea and on whose land they should be allowed to disembark. The ministers rubber-stamped a deal on Tuesday to set up a pool of on-call border guards for emergency operations.
The bloc’s border agency, Frontex, said this would not solve the problem. The pool of nearly 500 guards would be sent only on emergency operations and would not stay permanently, either around Malta or Spain’s Canary Islands, it said.
"Frontex is not and will never be the panacea to problems of illegal migration," Frontex’s director Ilkaa Laitinen said in a letter. He said its mission was not to conduct search-and-rescue operations but to protect borders.
Thousands are believed to die each year attempting perilous sea crossings to Europe.
