Italy’s PM Meloni seeks broad cooperation to curb flows of migrants to Europe
- At a summit of Mediterranean leaders in Rome on Sunday, Giorgia Meloni laid the foundations for a fund to finance investment projects and support border controls
- During her 2022 election campaign, Meloni vowed to ‘stop the disembarkation’ of migrants in Italy
Italy hosted Mediterranean leaders in Rome on Sunday at a conference aimed at extending an EU-backed deal with Tunisia to curb the arrival of migrants on European shores.
Opening the conference, Meloni said talks would focus on illegal and legal immigration, refugee support and “the most important … wide cooperation to support development in Africa”.
The day of talks was the “start of a process” that would be followed with a donors’ conference to finance investment projects and support border control, Meloni said, adding that no date had yet been set.
“The Mediterranean can no longer be the theatre of death and inhumanity”, the pontiff said during his weekly Angelus prayer.
But while the government has put obstacles in the path of humanitarian ships rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean, it has failed to stop the departures themselves, which mostly originate in Tunisia and Libya.
Italy and the European Commission have sought to step up engagement with Tunisia, promising funding if it stems emigration from its territory.
The deal also provides for more Tunisians who arrive illegally to be repatriated, and for sub-Saharan African migrants in Tunisia to be sent back to their countries of origin.
A much larger EU package to Tunisia, a long-term loan of around 900 million euros proposed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in June, is conditional on approval of the IMF loan.
“Tunisia is a nation that is in extreme distress and clearly leaving it to its fate can have consequences that are very serious,” Meloni told reporters on Sunday.
“We must cooperate with the countries of North Africa, even if to do so we have to accept that they are not perfect democracies,” a Rome-based ambassador said.
“There is unity in the EU on this principle.”
Federica Infantino, researcher at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, said a new deal with Tunisia would change little.
“You can’t think of migration as the water that comes out of the tap, to be turned on and off as certain politicians see fit,” Infantino said.
But for Meloni’s political needs, there are “strong symbolic stakes”, she added.
Human rights groups and charities that rescue migrants attempting the dangerous Mediterranean crossing are furious about the deal.
Human Rights Watch called it “a new low in the European Union’s efforts to curb migrants’ arrivals at any cost” that “pays only lip service to human rights”.