Five European Union member nations on the Mediterranean Sea retaliated against their northern neighbours on Saturday for refusing to accept asylum seekers under a voluntary relocation effort, less than a week after a fatal migrant shipwreck off the coast of Italy.
Prior to the EU ministerial conference on migration that will take place in Brussels next week, the ministers in charge of migration policy from Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, and Spain met in Valletta, the capital of Malta.
The MED 5 nations began collaborating in 2021 to address the issues posed by illegal immigration. Only 1% of the migrants who entered those front-line countries along the EU's southern border last year were taken in by other EU members as part of a voluntary relocation programme, the Greek Minister of Migration and Asylum Notis Mitarachi told reporters.
If there is not an equally prescriptive and mandatory solidarity mechanism towards the nations of first reception, we cannot continue to discuss the necessity to place additional responsibility on front-line member states, Mitarachi said.Fernando Grande-Marlaska Gomez, Spain's interior minister, claimed that the existing system is "too slow, too selective, with too few outcomes and too little predictability."
In the second part of 2023, when Spain would hold the rotating presidency of the EU, he promised to develop a more practical system.
The ministers stressed the necessity of cooperating with the nations that numerous migrants pass through and their home countries. According to Malta's home affairs minister, such measures can include providing financial aid to countries of origin or transit to stop the flow of people to Europe, Byron Camillieri, said.
The officials also demanded that Frontex, the EU border agency, allocate additional resources and quicken the rate at which non-asylum seekers are returned.
"It is crucial that we make a distinction between individuals who are entitled to international protection under the law and those who are not for the credibility of the asylum system," Mitarachi added.
"And those who are not should be sent back to their nation of origin in safety and dignity."
The UN organisation for refugees estimates that 160,100 migrants entered Europe over the Mediterranean Sea last year, a 30% increase from 2021.
Thousands of people are believed to have died trying to cross the sea to Europe in recent years. At least 70 migrants died after a wooden boat that set out from Turkey crashed on a shoal off the southern Italian coast, in Calabria, early last Sunday.
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