Malta pushes for EU re-admission agreements with third countries

Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg has insisted with his European Union counterparts that the bloc steps up its efforts to conclude common re-admission agreements with third countries, in particular with North Africa.

Dr Borg was addressing the EU's Justice and Home Affairs Ministers during a council meeting in Brussels on Monday.

Since September 2000, the European Commission has been authorised to negotiate community re-admission agreements with 11 third countries or territories. These included negotiations with Morocco, Algeria and Turkey, which are of particular interest to Malta in view of the increasing number of illegal immigrants entering the country.

To date, these negotiations have not been successfully concluded and various European council meetings have expressed concern over this lack of progress.

Speaking to The Times in Brussels, Dr Borg said Malta emphasised the need to conclude as soon as possible these agreements because it would greatly facilitate the process of the repatriation of illegal immigrants from Malta to such countries. Most of the illegal immigrants who land in Malta depart from North African countries and a re-admission agreement between the EU and these countries would make it possible for Malta to send back illegal immigrants to the country from where they began their journey.

During the council meeting Malta agreed with a proposal by the Belgian government to develop an information exchange network for criminal records across the EU. The proposal follows a very serious case unveiled some weeks ago in Belgium where a French forest warden confessed to killing at least nine people on both sides of the Belgian-French border.

He moved to Belgium to work in a school after serving time in France for child sex offences but the Belgian authorities were unaware of his criminal record at the time of his employment.

Dr Borg said that although certain member states still had some reservations about how this exchange network would work, Malta fully agreed with the need to share information and for all EU members to work together to combat crime. He said that a unified approach was surely much better than the segmented one where every member state implemented its own system.