Migration proposal aims to help Mediterranean countries

Commission to launch dialogue with the countries of the southern Mediterranean.

The European Commission is set to launch a “dialogue on migration, mobility and security” with the countries of the southern Mediterranean. 

A communication expected to be adopted by European commissioners next week (24 May) proposes that the countries of the region should receive increased assistance for managing migration in return for commitments to accept repatriated migrants and to tighten border controls.

The proposals are part of a sweeping review of the Union’s migration policies prompted by migration from north Africa following popular uprisings this spring.

A wave of around 25,000 Tunisians arriving in Italy, most of them economic migrants, has been followed by some 14,000 arrivals from Libya in Italy and Malta, with more than 1,600 arriving last weekend.

Many of the new arrivals are from African countries to which they cannot return, such as Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia, and are testing the EU’s protection mechanisms.

Request for assistance

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Italy and Malta have been asking for refugees from Libya to be resettled elsewhere in the Union, but the response by other member states has been lukewarm.

Cecilia Malmström, the European commissioner for home affairs, is seeking to balance the member states’ focus on controlling migration with more positive measures as part of a ‘migration partnership’ with north Africa.

The partnership is supposed to open some very limited avenues for legal migration, an idea that is unpopular with several member states. Malmström is also keen on strengthening mechanisms for refugee resettlement between member states.

Next week’s communication follows a broader communication on migration adopted by the Commission on 4 May. A national diplomat said that the measures outlined in the two communications go “in the right direction” but that the member states were now waiting for actual legislative proposals.

The Commission is also seeking to support neighbouring countries in building democracy, as part of an ongoing review of the Union’s neighbourhood policy.

FRONTEX ROW

Negotiations between Malta and Frontex, the EU’s border-management agency, over patrols in the Mediterranean, broke down last week because Malta refuses to accept Frontex’s standard operating procedures.

“We have not reached any agreement, so there will be no Frontex mission this year,” Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, Malta’s interior minister, told the Sunday Times of Malta of 15 May.

Under current rules, a member state that hosts a Frontex operation has to admit all migrants intercepted by the operation and screen them for asylum claims. Malta, by contrast, is demanding that Frontex apply the ‘closest safe port’ principle and allow intercepted migrants to disembark on Sicily or Lampedusa, a small Italian island off the Tunisian coast.