8 nations agree to take migrants after rescue ship docks in Malta
ROME — A rescue ship carrying more than 200 African migrants docked in Malta on Wednesday after eight European countries agreed to take them in, ending an impasse that had left the ship stranded in the Mediterranean for a week.
The solution, coming one day before a European Union summit in Brussels that will cover migration, highlighted the enormous obstacles that the bloc faces in finding common ground on the issue.
Countries that border the Mediterranean and have borne the brunt of arrivals from North Africa are increasingly insisting that other nations share the responsibility for taking them in.
But Prime Minister Joseph Muscat of Malta said that the arrangement made over the migrants onboard the ship, the MV Lifeline, was an ad hoc agreement and “not a pattern” or “a blueprint.”
It was, he added during a news conference shown live on his Facebook page, “a situation where there were member states who showed that for them the values of European solidarity are not something to be found just in the treaties, but that we act together.”
In addition to Malta, the countries that agreed to take a share of the migrants were Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal, he said.
Germany — where a dispute between Chancellor Angela Merkel and her interior minister over immigration policy has threatened the chancellor’s coalition for weeks — was not among them.
Muscat also said that the ship would be impounded, pending an investigation of its actions, its registration and its captain, whom the prime minister accused of disobeying the orders of the Italian authorities that coordinated the migrants’ rescue last week.
Earlier this month, another rescue vessel, the French ship Aquarius, was banned from docking in Italy and Malta. It was eventually allowed entry to Spain, which granted permission for its 630 passengers to dock after a lengthy odyssey.