Europeans favour fair placement of migrants

Over 8,000 rescued

PARIS, June 27, (Agencies): Citizens from Europe’s wealthier nations accept that their countries should take more asylum seekers than poorer ones, researchers said on Monday.

In a survey of 18,000 eligible voters from 15 European nations a “large majority” said countries with more “capacity” should host more migrants.

Capacity is measured by a country’s population size and gross domestic product, among other factors.

Simply leaving migrants in the country where they first arrive is not the answer, the survey participants said.

Yet this has been the practice to date — creating a disproportionate burden for countries such as Greece and Turkey where many migrants from the Middle East and Africa first set foot.

Knowing how voters feel about hosting migrants should help draw up a better regional asylum system, said the authors of a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The results “suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism,” they wrote.

“As Europe faces the most severe refugee crisis since World War II, reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has emerged as an urgent policy challenge for European governments,” said the paper.

“With more than 1.3 million new asylum claims lodged in Europe in 2015 alone, policymakers are struggling to design robust and fair asylum policies that ... also inspire domestic public support.”

The matter “increasingly threatens the social cohesion” of European countries, said the authors.

The survey was conducted in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.

“A large majority (72 percent) of respondents prefer proportional allocation” of migrants based on country means, the researchers found.

This was the case “even in countries that would have to shoulder a greater responsibility compared with the status quo.”

Only 18 percent of those surveyed voted for the country-of-first-entry approach.

The results suggested that reform “could be broadly agreeable to the public,” said the authors.

“At the very least, they (policymakers) should be emboldened by this evidence that there is little reason to fear reprisal in the court of public opinion.”

Meanwhile, more than 8,000 migrants have been rescued in waters off Libya during the past 48 hours in difficult weather conditions, Italy’s coastguard said Tuesday.

“On Monday, we rescued about 5,000 people from four large boats, one smaller one and 18 rubber dinghies,” a spokesman told AFP.

Qassem

Safety

People were pulled to safety by coastguard vessels, military ships operating under the EU’s border agency Frontex and aid boats run by privately funded organisations. Their efforts were coordinated by the coastguard.

“Together with Sea Watch and Sea Eye our crew was able to save more people last night under bad weather conditions,” the German NGO Jugend Rettet tweeted on Tuesday, referring to two other nonprofit groups.

It said that “three people died”, though it was not clear whether the victims were found dead or died during the rescue.

Italy’s coastguard said it was seeing “a lot of activity” on Tuesday, “but not at the same level as on Monday”. Spain’s Civil Guard said one of its vessels serving under Frontex’s anti-trafficking Operation Triton had rescued 133 people found on an inflatable dinghy off Libya.

Those rescued included 17 minors, two babies and 23 women, seven of whom were pregnant, it said.

The crew was coming to the assistance of two other dinghies and had been asked to assist three others, it said, adding that the vessel expected to end up with 1,300 migrants on board, “its maximum capacity”.

Traffickers on the North African coast take advantage of periods of good weather to set large numbers of migrants seeking passage to Europe out to sea, a notoriously dangerous crossing.

In related news, when Libya’s coastguard received the first of a long-awaited batch of patrol boats from Italy last month, two of the four vessels still had mechanical problems and one broke down on the way to Tripoli.

As Italy’s interior minister later flew in to present the boats officially at a naval base in the Libyan capital, coast guards grumbled that the vessels were old and had little deck space for rescued migrants.

“They want us to be Europe’s policeman. At the same time, that policeman needs resources,” said naval coastguard spokesman Ayoub Qassem. “I challenge anyone to work in these conditions.”

Half a million people have crossed the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy over the past four years, mainly sub-Saharan Africans who pay smugglers to shepherd them across the desert to Libya, and onward to Europe in unseaworthy dinghies. An estimated 13,000 of them have drowned.

European governments want to stop the migrants and break the grip of the smugglers. But more than four months after Italy and the European Union launched a new push to tackle the crisis, accounts by migrants, aid workers and officials show that effort is all but failing to make a difference.

When Libyan authorities do catch migrants, they take them to detention centres nominally under the control of the government, which already house about 8,000 people. Though Europeans have pledged funding to improve the camps, some are still so cramped that migrants have to sleep sitting up.

Also: BUCHAREST, Romania:

Romanian border police have found 91 migrants from Iraq and Syria hidden in a truck transporting auto parts. They told police they were trying to reach the visa-free Schengen travel zone.

Police stopped and searched the vehicle with Turkish plates early Tuesday at the crossing point between Nadlac and Csanadpalota in Hungary. According to documents, it was transporting the parts to Norway.

Police found 44 men, 18 women and 29 minors aged 2 to 17. The migrants told police they wanted to reach the Schengen zone. Hungary is a member, but Romania isn’t. The driver told Romanian authorities he did not know about the migrants.

The migrants are being probed on suspicion of illegally attempting to cross the border, while the driver is suspected of being an accomplice.