Malta has proposed that African countries free of conflict which do not accept travel documents issued to failed asylum seekers should lose EU development aid.
The proposal was made to the newly formed EU task force for the Mediterranean, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat told Parliament last night as he answered questions from the Opposition after making a statement on the last EU summit. Travel documents are issued by European countries to irregular migrants whose asylum applications are turned down, so that they can be repatriated.
Dr Muscat said EU border agency Frontex had failed in its remit to provide return flights to asylum seekers’ home countries.
Malta, he said, was proposing that the EU exert its diplomatic strength to oblige these countries to accept the travel documents if they are free of conflict.
He also said that Malta was ready to enter into a repatriation agreement with Libya but it could not do so because the EU had as yet not accepted that the situation in Libya was stable. The majority of EU countries, he added, were supporting a proposal by the Maltese Ambassador to the EU, Marlene Bonnici, for illegal migration to top the agenda during an EU-Africa summit taking place next April.
On Friday, EU leaders agreed to ask the task force to draft a short-term plan of action on tackling migration by December, a conclusion hailed by the Government as a break-through but lambasted by the Opposition as a step backward for failing to mention Malta.
Earlier in his address to Parliament, the Prime Minister said the Government was ready to accept the Opposition’s invitation for cooperation on the issue but this should not be linked to any conditions.
He reminded the Leader of the Opposition that Labour, when in opposition, had always stood four square with the Nationalist government on migration, even though there were many differences between the two sides.
Dr Muscat recalled Simon Busuttil’s speeches in EU fora claiming a huge victory for Malta on changes to the Dublin II regulations. In 2009, a former Nationalist minister, Carm Mifsud Bonnici, had even said that Malta expected that every illegal immigrant would be relocated under the voluntary burden sharing pilot project.
Malta was not saying that the migration problem had been solved but at least a deadline had been established for operational decisions to be taken. Malta had already made a number of proposals at a technical level. Dr Muscat criticised Dr Busuttil for claiming that the summit had been a failure when Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta had said that at last migration had become a European issue.
He said EU leaders always maintained that Malta had signed a voluntary burden sharing agreement whenever Malta pressed for such burden sharing to become compulsory.
The Prime Minister said that he excluded nothing in negotiations. He had said that while Lampedusa was not considered a safe harbour and Sicily had declared an emergency on migration issues, Malta would take action to protect its own national interests. Contact had been made on Tuesday between the parents and children of a Syrian family who had been divided in the recent rescue operation. A solution to reunite them had been found.
Dr Muscat said that there was no cause of alarm on the polio outbreak in Syria. The Syrian migrants who arrived in Malta had been screened for this medical condition and no cases were reported.
On the US phone tapping issue, the Prime Minister said Malta did not have the capacity to know whether any such tapping was made in Malta. Clarifications would be sought. US surveillance of foreign allied leaders reported in the EU was to be condemned, he said.