Editorial

The outcome of the recent tripartite summit meeting in Rome between EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini, Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg, Foreign Minister Michael Frendo and their Italian counterparts, Gianfranco Fini and Giuseppe Pisanu, sounded like good news for Malta in its efforts to obtain EU support in tackling illegal immigration. Or was it?

An EU package of measures, that will be presented to the Justice and Home Affairs Council in Brussels next month, was discussed. The council will be asked to authorise joint maritime patrols in the Mediterranean to prevent illegal migration. These will be coordinated, it is said, by the newly formed EU Border Control Agency, Frontex, whose headquarters is in Poland. The patrols will include the participation of "all the EU member states involved" and "should be in place before next summer".

A €20 million EU emergency fund to assist countries like Malta to deal with a sudden influx of illegal immigrants will also be set up. It has been announced that Commissioner Frattini will be "pushing for a mechanism to ensure that Malta gets a good slice of the immigration emergency fund" and that this will "not be tied to how many immigrants are detained in Malta but rather on how big the problem is when the size of the country and the population density are taken into consideration".

The third strand to the package envisages the conclusion of a joint action plan of cooperation between the EU and Libya "in order to help Libya to manage its immigration problems more successfully". An Euro-Med task force on illegal immigration, "on the same structure as the Western Mediterranean Forum", will also be proposed.

In an interview with The Times last July, Mr Frattini not only vowed "to provide maximum help to an island facing an immigration crisis" but also said that "the EU has presented a framework programme specifically designed to react to illegal immigration" and that "the Union is holding talks with Libya on the possibility of establishing a long-term action plan". Mr Frattini said he had "given specific instructions to the Frontex agency to carry out a threat assessment of immigration arising from Libya".

One is aware, of course, that the wheels of EU bureaucracy grind exceedingly slowly - especially during the Brussels summer holidays. But, given that the EU Justice Commissioner had acknowledged last July that the problem of illegal immigration in Malta had become, in his own words, "exceedingly dangerous", it would seem dilatory in the extreme that a decision on the funding programmes and other concrete - long overdue - actions referred to in Rome will not be put to the Justice and Home Affairs Council until December (following Mr Frattini's tour de capitale) and a decision on funding programmes would probably not be reached until next February or March. The essential implementation of joint maritime patrols in the Mediterranean to prevent illegal immigration will not take place until next summer.

Despite Dr Frendo's optimistic (and, presumably, simply polite) words in Rome that the Maltese government was very satisfied with the proposals put forward, what is on the cards is not good enough. Malta cannot any longer be left dangling by Brussels on an EU string of increasingly undelivered promises of support. In the words of Martin Scicluna, at last February's National Conference on Immigration, "This is Malta's prime foreign policy issue". It needs to be tackled in Brussels more robustly and with greater alacrity. All member states, especially the affected ones, will benefit.