Leaders from the European Union and African Union countries meet in Valletta today for a crucial summit on migration. The meeting has taken on an even greater urgency as the tide of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa has turned into a tsunami.
While African leaders in countries of origin and transit have their own deep-seated problems with migration, for the EU the stakes could not be higher. Indeed, a further meeting of EU leaders will take place immediately after the Valletta summit to focus on the crucial need to solve the threat to Europe’s borders.
The EU faces an unprecedented crisis of leadership and morale. It is a crisis that it will fail to overcome as long as it remains unwilling to confront its true scale. It presents the Union with an unprecedented challenge to its identity, its administrative muscle and its ability to combine compassion with pragmatic solutions.
The external shock of the refugee crisis has destabilised Schengen and embittered EU relations internally. It is fuelling anti-EU, anti-immigrant, populist extremism and defying efforts to devise a coherent response, let alone an effective one.
The EU’s Agenda on Migration, launched on May 13, was high on ambition and rhetoric but low on delivery. Six months on, the time for action, not words, is paramount. Unless the Valletta summit comes up with tangible actions to address the issues, the Union’s already battered reputation for competence and unity will be severely, perhaps irretrievably, dented.
Starting with those areas where African leaders can help, there should be a greater focus on curbing migration at source. One practical way to keep migrants and refugees out of the Mediterranean Sea and South-Eastern Europe is to set up joint national-EU transit camps in North African or Middle Eastern countries, designed to take people rescued at sea or at arrival points for those carrying out the long trek across Africa.
Safe zones, joint reception centres and transit camps in transit countries close to areas of conflict (such as Syria), where asylum seekers can be processed in an orderly manner should be established. Asylum applications can then be considered there, thus enabling the EU to strengthen its borders and to exercise control, in conjunction with refugee agencies, over the whole process without exposing front-line states to the administrative, financial and social burdens of handling the applications of thousands arriving by sea or land.
The EU must also have the vision to draw up a comprehensive plan on how those given asylum are to be relocated in Europe. Although it was announced in May that talks between the EU and Tunisia on establishing transit camps had begun, and it was thought that Morocco, Niger and Nigeria might also be willing to cooperate, there has been a deafening silence since. The summit must resolve this.
Moreover, comprehensive return programmes and speedy extradition procedures for failed asylum seekers should be formally drawn up between the EU and countries of origin.
Generous use should be made of European financial and development aid. Liberally-funded cooperation agreements between EU destination countries and transit countries should be drawn up to strengthen borders and to discourage migration.
Closer cooperation between border forces to crack down and eliminatepeople-traffickers should be enhanced. There must be a humanitarian path through the current immigration chaos engulfing Europe. This time there must be agreement on tangible action.