No pledges by France on burden sharing

Immigration will be a major priority for France when it takes over the EU presidency in a couple of months' time, the French Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux said yesterday.

He was speaking just after a meeting with his counterpart, Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, at the ministry in Valletta. Earlier he had met Foreign Affairs Minister Tonio Borg.

"One of the main priorities of the French presidency will be migration. It's a question which concerns all the countries in Europe and it will be a main priority," he said.

However, when asked by The Times whether France would be supporting Malta's proposal for burden sharing, the minister replied only that the argument for it was made strongly by both Dr Borg and Dr Mifsud Bonnici and that the matter will be considered carefully in a series of European conferences that will be held between July and October.

Similarly, when asked for his opinion regarding this year's Frontex mission, which remains beached almost two weeks after it was meant to have started, Mr Hortefeux said France wanted the role of the agency reinforced by splitting up the work of the agency in two directions, that on land and the maritime direction with air and sea units.

"We want to reinforce Frontex against the challenge of migratory flows," he said when the question was reiterated.

The Times reported last week that this year's operation, Nautilus III, had been bogged down by disagreement between Malta and Italy on one hand and France and Germany on the other over who should be responsible for illegal immigrants saved in Libya's Search and Rescue (SAR) area during the operation.

The mission will involve operations inside the zone designated by the International Maritime Organisation as Libya's SAR area and is likely to lead to the rescue of people trying to travel to Europe from Libya.

Because Libya has refused to take back people rescued during previous Frontex missions, Malta and Italy are arguing they shouldn't become the recipients of all illegal immigrants leaving Libya. France and Germany, however, are refusing to share the burden.

A spokesman for the frontier agency had told The Times that technical meetings were to be held this week in a bid to resolve the outstanding problems but no solution seems to have been forthcoming so far.