Interior ministers from four EU countries yesterday met in Malta to try to work out an automatic system to determine which countries would welcome migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean.
The ministers from France, Germany, Italy and Malta hoped to end the long, drawn-out negotiations that have seen vulnerable asylum seekers including babies stranded at sea, sometimes for weeks.
The meeting takes place ahead of a European summit in Luxembourg next month.
The mooted automatic distribution system is only a temporary solution until the current system, the “Dublin regulation,” can be revised.
Its critics have long argued that it places an unfair burden on the Mediterranean frontier countries Italy, Malta, Greece and Spain.
Italy’s new, pro-EU government has moved quickly to turn the page on the hardline anti-migrant policies pursued by former Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, who closed the ports to those rescued.
A successful European migrant agreement would be a blow to Salvini, showing that cooperation achieves better results than confrontation.
After a meeting last week, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and French President Emmanuel Macron called for a reform of Europe’s “ineffective” policy.
Countries that did not volunteer to take migrants should face financial penalties, they said.
In a sign of how things have changed over the past few weeks, Italy late on Sunday authorized charity rescue vessel the Ocean Viking to disembark its 182 people rescued at sea in Messina, Sicily.
The Italian decision “puts an end to five days of unnecessary suffering,” said charities SOS Mediterranee and Doctors Without Borders, which operate the ship.
“It is unacceptable that the people who have survived this very dangerous crossing … are stranded at sea for days and sometimes weeks before finding a place of safety,” the ship’s search and rescue coordinator Nicola Stalla said.
“It is urgent that a European agreement is found to put an end to these repeated stand-offs,” he said in a statement.
At an informal meeting of foreign and interior ministers in Paris in June, 15 countries agreed to the creation of a “European Solidarity Mechanism.”
Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Portugal said they would “actively” take part, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, rejected redistribution quotas in comments made during a visit to Rome on Saturday.
Yesterday’s meeting in Malta would try to decide where those rescued can be relocated — and whether that covers just those fleeing war and persecution, or economic migrants too.
Meanwhile, security and municipal services on the Greek island of Lesbos were to hold an emergency meeting yesterday after administrators of a refugee camp said they were overwhelmed by the number of arrivals from nearby Turkey.
The camp at Moria on the Aegean Sea island on Friday began turning away new arrivals, as the number of people at the site exceeded 12,000, four times its intended capacity.
The rapidly rising numbers — the highest entering the European Union — have created the worst crisis on the island since the massive influx of refugees into Europe four years ago.
Hundreds of migrants unable to find camp accommodation are already sleeping in the open or in tents.
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