The German Ministry of the Interior wants to stop refugees ever reaching Europe’s Mediterranean coast by picking them up at sea and returning them to Africa, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported yesterday.
In what would be a huge shift for a country with one of the most generous asylum policies, the ministry says the EU should adopt an Australian-style system under which refugees intercepted at sea are sent for processing at camps in third countries.
“The elimination of the prospect of reaching the European coast could convince migrants to avoid embarking on the life-threatening and costly journey in the first place,” the paper quoted a ministry spokeswoman as saying.
Photo: AP / Francesco Malavolta / MOAS
“The goal must be to remove the basis for people-smuggling organizations and to save migrants from the life-threatening journey,” she said.
The ministry’s proposal calls for refugees picked up in the Mediterranean — most of whom set off from Libya — to be sent to Tunisia, Egypt or other north African states to apply for asylum from there.
If their asylum applications are accepted, the refugees could then be transported safely to Europe.
German Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats. Merkel has been under fire for her open-door refugee policy, with her party losing votes to the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party in recent regional elections.
The ministry said there were no concrete plans or discussions at EU-level about the proposal, but opposition politicians condemned it.
Bernd Riexinger, head of the opposition Left party, said it would be “a humanitarian scandal and a further step toward elimination of the right to asylum,” the paper reported.
He said asylum applications should be filed in Germany to ensure applicants had access to legal help and he called Australia’s treatment of refugees “absolutely unacceptable.”
More than 2,200 refugees were rescued in the Mediterranean on Saturday and 10 bodies were recovered, Italy’s coast guard said.
The International Organization for Migration last week said that 159,496 people had reached Italy by sea this year and 4,220 died trying — a sharp increase from 3,777 in the whole of last year.
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