EU mulls outsourcing its patrols of Mediterranean to Egypt, Tunisia

PanARMENIAN.Net - The EU is considering plans to outsource its patrols of the Mediterranean to countries such as Egypt and Tunisia in order to try to reduce the high numbers of desperate illegal migrants risking their lives to reach European shores, the Guardian reports.

Under the proposals tabled confidentially by the Italian government, the EU would cut deals with North African countries to fund and train their navies in search-and-rescue missions for the tens of thousands of people being trafficked from Libya to Italy. Once rescued, the migrants would be taken to the ports of the country saving them or sent back to their countries of origin.

“This would produce a real deterrent effect, so that less and less migrants would be ready to put their life at risk to reach the European coasts,” said an Italian government document outlining the scheme and obtained by the Guardian.

The Italians said such a radical shift in trying to deal with the mass migration across the Mediterranean was necessary because of the worsening scale of the problem.

The proposals were discussed last week by EU interior ministers meeting in Brussels and also this week with the European Commission, which is to produce new policy blueprints on how to cope with migration by May.

The interior ministries have also been discussing plans to establish and finance refugee camps or “reception centers” for migrants in North Africa and the Middle East to try to keep them from coming to Europe as well as out of the hands of the traffickers, and to set up “European” asylum-processing offices outside the EU in the same region.

Diplomats and officials in Brussels stress that the ideas being discussed by governments are at the exploratory stage, that no decisions have been taken, and that governments are divided.

Britain, for example, is strongly opposed to processing asylum applications outside the EU because such a system would require an agreed EU system for dividing the refugee arrivals between the 28 countries. Austria supports such a system for precisely the opposite reason, believing that an EU burden-sharing system would cut the numbers of refugees arriving there.

The controversial moves for dealing with the refugee flow are being pushed most actively by Italy, in the frontline of the often catastrophic events in the Mediterranean. France and Germany are also supportive.