Libya asks Italy to send warships in trafficking battle
ITALIAN warships are to enter Libyan waters to help in the fight against human traffickers after a plea from the Un-backed government in Tripoli.
It came as Europe’s top court yesterday rejected claims by Hungary and Slovakia that Brussels had no right to impose relocation quotas, which it said were a fair way of easing the pressure on Greece and Italy.
Fayez al-seraj, the Libyan prime minister, had earlier refused access to the EU’S anti-trafficking sea mission, but wrote to the Italian government in recent days seeking their help.
“A few days ago, President Seraj sent me a letter in which he asked the Italian government for technical support by our naval vessels in the common effort to fight human traffickers,” Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian prime minister, said yesterday.
The Italian navy’s surveillance technology could help the Libyans stop migrant boats before they are sent to sea.
Italy has been leading efforts to bolster Libya’s ability to fight smuggling, and officials were reportedly angered after Emmanuel Macron, the French president, brought Libya’s warring factions to a deal on Tuesday, cutting Italy out of the process. The chaos of the conflict has made it easier for people smugglers to send thousands of migrants across the sea since 2014, adding to the strain on the Continent.
The European Court of Justice’s ruling yesterday gave Brussels a legal boost in its battle with Eastern European states over migrant quotas, which remain a source of deep tension in Europe since they were imposed in 2015.
Yves Bot, the court’s advocate general, made the ruling in an advisory message. “The [quotas system] helps to relieve the considerable pressure on the asylum systems of Italy and Greece,” he said.
Hungary, Poland and Slovakia continue to refuse to accept the mandatory quotas since they were forced through in September 2015 using a qualified majority vote that broke with EU convention that such issues should be unanimously agreed.
The European Commission last month launched legal action against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic for defaulting on their obligations. Neither sides show any sign of backing down over the issue.
Hungary’s government immediately rejected the opinion, saying that it was
politically motivated and short on solid legal argument.
“The main elements of the statement are political, which are practically used to disguise the fact that there are no legal arguments in it,” Dr Pál Völner, the state secretary of the Justice Ministry, told MTI, the state news agency.
Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, has argued that accepting migrants must be a decision for national governments and that, in any case, refugees do not want forcibly to be settled in Hungary but in richer northern EU countries like Germany.
The Commission originally envisaged that 160,000 migrants would be distributed across European member states, but the EU admitted yesterday that only about 24,700 people had been moved from Greece and Italy under the plan. A 2016 deal with Turkey drastically cut arrivals from Turkey to Greece, making Italy the main gateway to Europe, with 94,400 arrivals so far this year.
In a separate ruling, seen as a setback for the Italian government, the ECJ upheld the right of member states to deport asylum seekers to the first EU country they entered.
The ruling amounted to an effective rejection of Angela Merkel’s “opendoor” refugee policy, which saw more than one million asylum seekers flood into Germany in 2015.
The court ruled that the EU’S Dublin regulations, under which refugees must seek asylum in the first member state they enter, still apply despite the unprecedented influx that year.
In doing so, the court ignored the advice of Eleanor Sharpston, its British advocate general, who warned that the system could leave border states “unable to cope”.