Malta and Italy have to solve migration problem together - Tajani

European Commission vice-president Antonio Tajani said today that Malta and Italy had to solve the problem of illegal migration together.

Addressing a joint press conference with Transport Minister Austin Gatt, the vice-president, who is also Commissioner for Tranport, said that illegal migration, which was causing friction between Malta and Italy, was a European problem. These two countries, he said, were on the frontier of Europe so the responsibility for illegal migration could not be shoulded by them alone.

He said he supported vice-president Jacques Barrot's idea that all states had to help share the burden by taking a quota of refugees. He also spoke in favour of repatriation except in the case of political refugees. The European Commission, he said, did not want these people to be persecuted or killed for political reasons.

Frontex had to be beefed up and reinforced and Europe had to have a common policy for stability in Africa. If the EU ignored the problem, Europe would, in future, face an influx of people that it would not be able to control any longer. "So we have to think about the problem now," he said.

Malta and Italy, he said, were most exposed and the two countries had to solve the problem together. The meeting between Roberto Maroni and Carm Mifsud Bonnici in Brussels in the presence of Mr Barrot was a step in the right direction and he supported Malta and Itlay's appeal to the EU to intervene.

Dr Gatt said that Malta had benefitted from EU membership with regards to transport getting 141 million euros up to 2012 for the Ten-T project, a trans-European network for transport, and another 34 million euros for the Motorways of the Sea, a project aimed at introducing new intermodal maritime-based logistics chains in Europe.