EU faces calls to take swift action on Med migrants
25 April 2015 4:32 AM IST
The leaders will examine a plan to respond to the crisis, after more than 10,000 migrants were plucked from seas between Italy and Libya in a week, and are widely expected to approve swift action.
EU president Donald Tusk urged the leaders from the 28 nations ‘to agree on very practical measures,’ including ‘strengthening search-and-rescue possibilities, by fighting the smugglers and by discouraging their victims from putting their life at risk, while reinforcing solidarity.’
EU officials say the leaders will commit to doubling the size of the European border agency effort in the Mediterranean, but those operations are designed for monitoring migrant movements, not necessarily saving lives.
A senior EU official said they are also expected to give the green light for a pilot project to resettle around 5,000 refugees. The official, who is involved in preparing Thursday’s summit in Brussels, is not permitted to speak publicly. That resettlement plan would amount to about half of those who have arrived in just the last week and a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands likely to arrive this year.
Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders want a multinational rescue effort launched to help the thousands fleeing conflict and poverty from places like Syria, Eritrea and Somalia. “The stakes are very high. The number of hours, literally, that it takes to take action will make the difference between life and death,’’ said Iverna McGowan, acting director of Amnesty’s European Institutions Office. According to the UN’s refugee agency, 219,000 refugees and migrants crossed the Mediterranean last year, and at least 3,500 died trying. Perhaps 1,000 have already died this month alone.
Critics blame the increased deaths on the phasing-out of Italy’s big rescue operation in 2013-14, Mare Nostrum, which worked close to the coast of Libya, the biggest migrant transit route. A smaller EU mission dubbed Triton was left to fill the vacuum, but it has no mandate for rescue work, although it does respond to distress calls under international obligations and has saved thousands of lives since its launch late last year.
Cameron offers war ship, helicopters to aid migrant rescues
British PM David Cameron said on Thursday Britain would offer to deploy military ships and helicopters to the Mediterranean to help stem a deadly tide of refugees trying to reach Europe by sea. But he stressed that this help would only be given “under the right conditions,” as he arrived at an emergency EU summit in Brussels called after 800 people were feared to have died in a shipwreck on Sunday.
“That must include that people that we pick up and people we deal with are taken to the nearest safe country, most likely Italy, and don’t have immediate recourse to claim asylum in the UK,” he said. Cameron, who is fighting for re-election at home where immigration is one of the hot-button issues, offered the Royal Navy flagship HMS Bulwark, three helicopters and two patrol ships. Military action is one of the key points that will be discussed at the summit later today, with a draft statement for the meeting committing leaders to “undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers”. EU governments are also expected to agree to double the financial resources available to EU maritime border patrol missions known as Triton and Poseidon.
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