France has promised to follow-up its intake of 99 refugees from Malta next month by taking another group of 100 next year, French immigration minister Eric Besson said just before leaving Malta this evening.
Addressing a joint news conference with Home Affairs Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici at the airport, he said when asked if he expected other EU countries to follow France’s example that he did not expect but he was asking them to.
One could not impose anything “but I’m asking them to follow. I came here symbolically to show my EU colleagues how burden sharing should work effectively. I hope other EU countries will inspire themselves according to their possibilities.”
The 99 refugees being taken by France will leave Malta on July 9. They were chosen in line with a number of criteria including knowledge of English and possibly French, having acquaintances or relatives in France and humanitarian needs.
They are being taken as part of a pilot project agreed by EU leaders earlier this month.
Asked whether the voluntary should become mandatory, Mr Besson said that politics was a relative art and it was there to make things happen. “The voluntary pact is the first step in the right direction.
“Greece, Cyprus, Malta and Italy wanted the pact to be mandatory but there were other states which did not agree with this position.”
Voluntary, he said, was the first step which had led to this pilot project, which he hoped would develop into other proper mechanisms.
He said that although France was committing itself to take another 100 immigrants next year, it was not making an annual commitment.
Mr Besson said he came to Malta to welcome the 99 people being received by his country next month because France had asylum rights very much at heart.
France, he said, wanted to continue to struggle against illegal migration. Trafficking was becoming very professional and the country wanted to continue exerting pressure on human traffickers who were exploiting human misery. It was able to do this through the police in individual states and Frontex.
Dr Mifsud Bonnici said that through France, the burden sharing concept was being achieved with France leading by example.
The Immigration and Asylum Pact had come to light under the French Presidency and the pilot project was now coming to fruition.
He said that it was easy to say that another country should take refuges but this was difficult to materialise because a lot of considerations had to be taken into account.
It was one thing to welcome people but a different thing to integrate them.
The aim, he said, was to develop the pilot project into a proper mechanism for more people to move from Malta to other EU states while strengthening Frontex to repatriate those who did not have a right for refugee status or humanitarian protection.