• Tweeter

  • republish

Migrants rescued by the ship Ocean Viking during their transfer to Maltese boats, 23 August 2019 (image for illustration). Anne CHAON / AFP

For more than a year, Europeans have relaunched negotiations stalled for two decades to find a lasting solution to the migration issue. It is especially the Dublin Regulation that poses a problem for the South because it forces migrants to apply for asylum in the country of entry. These new negotiations were stalled, but the departure of the League of the Italian government changed the situation. After Emmanuel Macron's visit to Giuseppe Conte last week where there was a lot of talk about this issue, the EU's interior ministers are meeting in Malta on Monday in the hope of cutting the Gordian knot and create a system of "redistribution" of migrants, in any case asylum seekers.

With our Brussels office,

This meeting organized by the Maltese government aims to get rid of the negotiations on migration and the intention is to put on the table a long-term solution at the next formal meeting of the Ministers of the Interior, on October 7th in Luxembourg.

Europeans are supposed to have set up a temporary mechanism for the relocation of migrants whose principle is to allow them to disembark and then direct them to a voluntary country to welcome them. In theory, this mechanism of solidarity focused on the baptismal font in July is to accept in his country automatically migrants according to a distribution key fixed in advance.

This mechanism was supposed to apply to all EU countries, including the Baltic and Central European countries of the Visegrad Group. Those who had already opposed the automatic distribution of migrants proposed in 2015 by the European Commission. The meeting in Valletta will help to see if the initiators of the solidarity mechanism, France and Germany in mind, have done the diplomatic work necessary to convince all 28 to join them.

It is insufficient, it will not be enough (...) It also needs more means ...

Fabienne Lassalle Deputy Executive Director of SOS Méditerranée France 22/09/2019 - by Anastasia Becchio Play