Migrant plan needs support
DECLARATION: VAGUE BUT A GOOD IDEA, SAY EXPERTS
Policy document is a way of unblocking impasse in EU over those saved at sea.
EU powers France, Germany and Italy, along with smaller member Malta, will tomorrow seek to rally the rest of the European bloc to a joint scheme they have come up with, to distribute migrants saved at sea.
But it was unclear, ahead of the meeting of EU interior ministers in Luxembourg, how many other states would sign to the so-called Malta declaration, reached two weeks earlier.
Migration remains a hot-button issue in the EU in the wake of a massive 2015 influx of mostly Syrian refugees fleeing war.
While the numbers have fallen to just a fraction since – under contentious EU deals done with Turkey and Libya to hinder migrants’ onward travel – no progress has been made in three years of efforts to reform the EU’s refugee policy.
The Malta declaration is an attempt at a stop-gap measure pending efforts by the incoming European Commission taking charge next month to unblock the refugee policy impasse under a vice-president specifically tasked with “protecting the European way of life”.
The text urges EU countries to take a share of the asylum-seekers crossing the Mediterranean, who are arriving mostly in Italy and Malta.
They either arrive in overcrowded boats or are rescued by ships run by NGOs. However, the document’s language is vague to avoid raising hackles.
It makes no mention of intake quotas, for instance, or punishment for EU states that do not participate, or how economic migrants with no right to asylum might be weeded out and returned to their country of origin.
The mechanism has just a six-month lifespan, renewable if there’s sufficient support.
“The beauty of this text is that you can’t be against it. But also you can maybe not be totally in favour of it. Because there are things lacking,” one European diplomat said.
“There’s hardly anything in there that describes the disembarkation, the disembarkation procedure and the relocation scheme afterwards,” the diplomat said. – AFP