EU leaders once again all at sea over migration

For Europe, there is more on the line at today’s mini-emergency summit on migration than national egos: there are several thousand lives at stake, as well as the European Union’s very humanitarian credentials being, after all, also on the line.

The European Union’s leaders will face a litmus test today, they will be tasked with addressing this humanitarian crisis just south of its shores, and they will face a choice of whether to turn a blind eye and retreat into a state of protectionism, or to show its true humanitarian mettle.

When EU leaders convene today, the onus will be on them to take the right decisions on the migrants facing so much peril in Libya and at sea, once they leave Libyan shores.

They must stand up for the values on which the bloc was built and not shrink into a state of protectionism. Today’s talks must, at all costs, respect and protect human dignity and human rights irrespective of whether they deal with EU nationals or not, and in so doing they will show the red card to the current US administration’s dubious treatment of migrants at its borders.

How could the EU possibly even speak to the US about this problem when it shifts boats carrying hundreds of would-be asylum seekers around the bloc like so many pieces on a chessboard?

There appears, however, to be little chance of that happening.

It is expected that 16 countries in all will partic- ipate in today’s talks, which come ahead of next week’s full summit of all EU leaders where migration will top the bill. Today’s meeting, however, already seems destined to failure, with the original participation of six leaders having now increased to 16 after more nations demanded participation. Meanwhile, four Eastern European countries – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – have boycotted today’s talks and refused to attend while also rejecting the taking in of any migrants in general.

With plans to reform Europe's asylum laws seemingly stuck in a quagmire, EU leaders hope to stop migrants leaving North Africa by paying countries like Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia to hold people in centres in North Africa until their eligibility for asylum can be established.

This same plan had been mooted back in 2009, well before the fall of Gaddafi, which was to see the United Nations assessing migrants’ asylum claims in Libya instead of them sailing off in rickety boats towards Malta and Italy – in the process saving countless lives otherwise tragically lost during the perilous Mediterranean crossing.

Of vast importance for Malta and other frontline countries, such a system would provide for a sort of automatic burden sharing, the absence of which has been conspicuous among Malta’s fellow EU member states despite the turmoil being experienced by the EU’s southern frontier countries.

Once asylum claims would be approved in North Africa, many of the several thousands of asylum seekers otherwise landing on Europe’s shores each year would instead be dispersed across the EU through the UNHCR’s quota system, which is already in place and provides for the settlement of refugees from other parts of the world in the EU.

That plan, hatched nine years ago, never came to fruition, mainly because the major logistical hurdles it faced. We see no reason why a rehash of a near-decade-old concept would hold water now.

Europe’s tough talk about the world’s most vulnerable comes at a time when the number of migrants entering Europe is actually dropping significantly, with the UN estimating that around 80,000 people are expected to arrive in Europe by sea this year – about half the number of 2017.

As a UN spokesperson succinctly put it: ‘We do not have a crisis of numbers. We continue to have a crisis of political will’.

By and large, we Europeans are humanitarians, but our leaders’ response to the migration crisis has been anything but. Today, and later next week, the EU faces one of its greatest litmus tests. The entire world, and not just its refugees, will be looking to Europe not only for solutions, but also for inspiration. Europe must not disappoint again.