EU and UN propose migrant rescue missions
BRUSSELS: The EU’s executive proposed yesterday taking in 20 000 migrants over two years and distributing them across Europe, a plan Britain, one of its largest members, has already opted out of.
The EU is trying to put in place a fairer way to resettle asylum-seekers at a time when anti-immigration parties are on the rise.
Italy and other southern European countries are clamouring for EU help to deal with the influx of migrants but, while Italy, Germany and Austria back a quota system, some EU states are opposed to it.
Britain, Denmark and Ireland have exemptions on matters concerning asylum, immigration, visas and external border controls based on protocols agreed in the EU’s Lisbon treaty. Denmark and Ireland have yet to comment.
“No country should be left alone to address huge migratory pressures,” European Commission president JeanClaude Juncker said on his Twitter account after the proposals were published.
Under a scheme based on country size, economic output and other measures, Germany would take the most migrants followed by France and Italy, assuming Britain does not change its stance.
British Interior Minister Theresa May criticised the EU’s approach, saying that by not sending economic migrants back, the bloc was encouraging them.
About 1 800 migrants had died in the Mediterranean this year, the UN refugee agency said. About 51 000 had entered Europe by sea, with 30 500 coming via Italy, fleeing war and poverty in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Most travelled to Europe through Libya.
Juncker argued in a video to accompany the commission’s proposal that Europe – a bloc of 500-million people – needed immigrants as its ageing workforce would dwindle by 2060 and that Europe needed to show solidarity.
Britain wants the EU to do more to target human traffickers in Libya who profit from the desperate migrants who attempt the perilous journey across the Mediterranean.
EU foreign ministers are expected to approve on Monday plans for a naval and air mission in the Mediterranean, based in Italy, to seize smugglers’ vessels. The resolution would authorise the EU to intervene in Libyan territorial waters and coastal areas.
Meanwhile Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia would continue to push boats holding thousands of migrants back to sea, a senior Thai official said yesterday, despite a UN appeal for a rapid rescue operation to avoid a humanitarian crisis.
Several thousand migrants, many of them hungry and sick, are adrift in South-East Asian seas in boats that have been abandoned by smugglers after a Thai government crackdown on human trafficking, the UN has said. – Reuters