Italy ultimatum over migrant rescue ships
Minister threatens to close ports to vessels bearing refugees if EU partners don’t share the burden
ITALY’S interior minister yesterday called on European countries to open their ports to migrant rescue ships as he met for crisis talks with his French and German counterparts.
Italy has threatened to close its ports to charity ships that rescue migrants in the Mediterranean if other EU states do not agree to take some of the growing number of refugees.
“We are under enormous pressure,” Marco Minniti said in Paris before talks ahead of an EU summit in Tallinn this week.
Italian media reports said Rome was likely to call for a European code of conduct to be drawn up for the privately-run aid boats, with the Corriere della Sera saying vessels that did not comply could be “seized”.
Over the past week alone, 10,000 migrants have been ferried to Italy after being rescued from overcrowded, rickety boats travelling from Libya.
More than 2,160 have died trying to reach Europe from Africa so far this year, and Italy has already taken in 82,000 migrants – 19 per cent more than in the same period last year.
Critics say the ships have become part of the business model of Libyan people smugglers who sell places on flimsy vessels by telling migrants that they are likely to be rescued at sea.
“There are NGO ships, Sophia and Frontex boats, Italian coast guard vessels saving migrants in the Mediterranean,” Mr Minniti said, referring to the charity boats as well as vessels deployed in EU border security missions.
“If the only ports where refugees are taken to are Italian, something is not working. This is the heart of the question,” he told Il Messaggero newspaper.
One rescue organisation, SOS Mediterranée, which runs an aid vessel along with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said forcing boats bearing migrants to go to other European ports would be logistically difficult.
If the order came, “we would have no choice, we would obey. But it would be completely impossible with more than 1,000 people on board,” spokesman Mathilde Auvillain told AFP. “And then we’d need to make a stopover in an Italian port to refuel, or we’d end up needing to be rescued ourselves.”
At the height of the migration crisis in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees were arriving from Turkey via the Balkans route, the EU set up a quota system to try to distribute some migrants to other member states. But that scheme barely got off the ground.
Migrant numbers arriving in Greece from Turkey have slowed to a trickle as a result of an EU deal with Ankara last year to halt the traffic.
But numbers are now surging on the Mediterranean route from Libya, with nearly all of them heading for Italy.
“What is happening in front of our eyes in Italy is an unfolding tragedy,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said at the weekend.
European Commission President Jean-claude Juncker has said that he would see what the EU could do “to relieve Italy and Greece in their difficult struggles”.