Editorial

It was perhaps inevitable that the much-vaunted meeting between European Union and African Ministers of Foreign and Home Affairs to discuss migration would end without agreement on two key aspects: repatriation arrangements and funding support. The negotiations between EU and African countries to find a way forward on the twin issues of migration and development failed to yield concrete commitments on how the two continents would cooperate to curb illegal migration. The European delegation, in which Malta's Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs were deeply involved, pressed African countries to accept a firm commitment to re-admit migrants caught entering Europe illegally.

But the African sticking point was that they would not take back migrants unless the EU was prepared to commit itself to setting up a migration fund for the countries of origin. For the EU, with its complex - and sclerotic - funding structures, promising a ring-fenced migration fund for this purpose was a bridge too far. It was particularly frustrating that the issue of repatriation proved insurmountable since only a few weeks ago, during preparatory talks in Malta, the African delegation had agreed to it. As Malta might wryly comment, the Cotonou Agreement of 2000, in which African countries had agreed to re-admit illegal immigrants caught in Europe "without further formalities", is not worth the paper it is written on.

The reality is that African countries can see that their strongest negotiating card to obtain more aid from Europe lies in ensuring that greater funds are allocated in return for agreement to re-admit migrants. They seek a specific migration fund for this purpose, the feasibility of which the EU has promised to examine. Malta, which, in the words of Deputy Prime Minister Tonio Borg, has always seen "the generous allocation of development aid for the eradication of poverty in countries of origin... tied to re-admission as an incentive to closer cooperation" would surely back such an approach by other member states.

The Tripoli conference was always going to be the first step in a process of dialogue and negotiation, hopefully leading in time to closer cooperation on this tragic global human phenomenon. The continents of Africa and Europe represent the Janus face of illegal immigration . On the one hand, Africa, with its poverty, its desperate reliance on development aid and millions of potential migrant workers and, on the other, rich Europe acting like a magnet to illegal immigrants in search of a better life. It will be another generation at least before Europe - including Malta - will be able to see any reduction of the pathetic flow of migrants from Africa.

While the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was being somewhat simplistic when he said that "abolishing migration would logically imply that people everywhere should return home to the continents their ancestors first migrated from", he was surely right to say that, in today's circumstances, African migration to Europe was inevitable.

The challenge in the wake of the joint Africa-EU summit on migration and development in Tripoli is to take forward the work begun there to the stage of finding imaginative and constructive solutions to halting illegal immigration. This must involve a whole battery of actions, among which agreement by Africa to the obligatory return, re-admission and re-integration of illegal immigrants to their countries of origin. The generous injection of even more development aid by Europe, targeted at solving this problem, will have to play a key part. It is however imperative that both parties remain consistent.