Four ways the EU can stop migrants drowning as they flee North Africa

Bodies washed up after a migrant boat sank off Lampedusa

Source: EU observer
 
By Judith Sunderland

A man named Mohammed posted this plea on the Migrants at Sea website three days after a rickety boat capsized on 6 April in rough seas just 39 miles from Lampedusa:

"i wont to know if my brother is there with the eritreans died in the sea his name is sebah tahir nuru." 

The long-expected exodus by sea from war-torn Libya has begun, and with it the tragic and avoidable loss of life.

Leading EU member states such as France and the UK are active players in the UN Security-Council-mandated Nato air operations to protect Libya's civilian population. Yet when it comes to civilians fleeing Libya by boat, EU states seem more concerned with domestic politics than saving lives.

More than 200 people, including children, are presumed dead in the 6 April tragedy. Two young women died on 13 April when the small boat that held them and over 200 others smashed into rocks off Sicily. As many as 800 more people who have left Libya by boat in the following days are unaccounted for.

A survivor of an unsuccessful crossing told me there were 72 people in his boat when it left Libya. When the boat was already in distress, what appeared to be a military helicopter hovered above and dropped some water and biscuits. The captain of the boat decided to remain in the area, believing the helicopter would send a rescue team. None came. As the boat, now out of fuel, drifted, the occupants saw what looked like an aircraft carrier and tried to convey that they were in distress, but received no help. The boat drifted for two weeks before the currents pushed it back to Libya. Only nine out of the 72 people on board survived.

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More internal EU refugee relocations under new plan

Image via Wikipedia  

Source: Ecre

Eight refugees from Sudan and Somalia were relocated to Slovenia in the framework of the European Re-allocation for Malta (Eurema) pilot project. 255 individuals should benefit from this project according to the Maltese Home Affairs Ministry. Nine Member States, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia and the UK, participate in the project.

Each relocated refugees will receive courses on the culture and life in the country, as well as an ‘integration package’. The project is expected to finish next year.

Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced in the EU Council - Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) in September that the Commission will submit a proposal on solidarity and responsibility sharing within the EU, which would include the issue of relocation of refugees. This proposal will follow a feasibility study published in July 2010.

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EU asylum policy ‘contradictory and self-centred’

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Source: Malta Independent

by Noel Grima

The momentum behind an EU asylum policy has run out of steam and will possibly impose more stresses on Malta because the policy is at the mercy of the EU member states who have obtained what they want out of it and will not do more.

This was the opinion, expressed yesterday by Martin Watson, a keynote speaker at a half-day conference on Asylum in Malta and the EU held at Dar l-Ewropa, Valletta.

But it was also a sentiment shared by many other speakers at the conference who agreed that the situation is bleak, that the Union for the Mediterranean and the Barcelona Process are dead and that the EU basically wants to push the asylum problem if possible outside the EU frontiers or at the very least to the frontier states, of which Malta is one.

What is called the EU’s asylum policy, Mr Watson said, began in the 1980s when Germany, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, for their own internal markets decided they needed the free movement of peoples inside the EEC. Thus was born the Schengen Pact in 1985, not out of any humanistic idealism but to enlarge the common market.

What followed were the years of the Balkan conflict which produced a huge wave of asylum seekers who began shopping around for asylum and applying to many countries at the same time. Germany was the country most targeted, followed by Sweden and Belgium, possibly due to their generous assistance.

In typical EU fashion, the member states then decided to harmonise the processes and thus there was the Dublin Treaty, followed by the London resolution and the Amsterdam Treaty which harmonized the way the seekers were received, the procedure to be followed and the qualification of those to be accepted.

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