European Council President Donald Tusk and the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz jointly addressed Parliament this evening, saying they expected the Valletta Summit tomorrow and on Thursday to herald action on migration.
The guests were welcomed to the House by the Speaker, Anglu Farrugia.
Mr Schulz said it was an honour for him to be the first foreign speaker at the new Parliament, built to Renzo Piano’s design. Malta was a tremendously successful melting pot of ideas and a beacon of solidarity, he said.
The melting pot was evidenced even in its cuisine and language. But this was also a country which was economically successful despite lacking natural resources.
Malta, the smallest of the EU states, was a shining example in economic and social terms. This was a country with falling unemployment, a growing employment rate, including youth employment, a falling deficit, free childcare for all and gender equality, among others.
Malta was also an example of the moral duty to help while addressing people’s worries, Mr Schulz said.
Desperation led many to cross land and seas and he was impressed by the generosity shown to the migrants by the Maltese.
“I cannot but commend you, the Maltese people and the elected representatives for your enormous efforts to rescue and accommodate refugees,” he said.
But, he said, at least 3,400 had died in the Mediterranean this year. “We cannot watch idly by, every life counts,” he said. The summit this week was much needed because no country could tackle migration alone. Despite the attention on the Balkans, the Mediterranean route was the biggest and riskiest migration route.
We must use the Valletta Summit wisely to stop patching up short-term solutions and come up with comprehensive migration policy with African partners- Martin Schulz
Measures were needed to stop wars, persecution and the other factors which drove people to leave their countries.
"We must use the Valletta Summit wisely to stop patching up short-term solutions and come up with comprehensive migration policy with African partners,” he said.
That would include boosting economies, fighting smugglers, assisting countries to take migrants back and improving legal migration.
Highlighting the migration burden on individual countries including Malta, he said EU countries needed to stick together and achieve fair sharing of responsibility. This lesson, he said, had still not been learnt and migration threatened to tear EU members apart.
"To distribute one million among a region of 570 million people should not be a problem," he said. "It is our common European task."
"I call on all European states to get their act together," he said. "This is about saving lives and upholding our European values."
Donald Tusk said Malta was always at the crossroads of European history, and still held true today in the issue of migration.
He thanked Malta for its assistance in tackling the migration crisis. Thousands of people had been saved as a result.
He said implementation of the actions agreed in five summits on migration held this year needed to be speeded up, and this would be discussed in the European Council meeting on Thursday.
The EU and Africa had a challenge which went beyond migration and also included social inequalities and growing instability.
Europe and Africa would not develop a new framework for migration, but they would set out a roadmap to put meat on the principles they agreed on, including fighting smugglers and legal migration. “This summit is about action,” he said.
The new European Emergency Fund of €1.8m would help offer the people of Africa a better future. The EU was offering more space for African students and it was funding more training programmes in African countries.
But more action was needed on the repatriation of migrants including a stronger administrative infrastructure in the African countries.
Mr Tusk noted that Malta had, for years, been calling for a more coherent approach on migration. He hoped that the summit would lead to a range of priority actions “to get there quickly”. One priority, he said, was restoring effective control on the borders and co-responsibility for migrants.
“We have come here to become better neighbours,” he said.
MUSCAT UNDERLINES NEED FOR EU REFORM
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat spoke on migration, the Maltese economy and his views on the EU’s future, with an eye on the UK’s calls for institutional reform.
He said the Valletta Summit did not aspire to be the solution to everything, but it promised to be the first significant step for dialogue between two continents which needed to work much closer together.
This, he said, should lead to measures that would save lives, give asylum to those who deserved it, repatriate those who did not qualify, safeguard national borders and help countries of origin.
The prime minister also spoke on the sense of being European in the EU’s smallest state. He said Malta enjoyed a sense of optimism that stemmed from decisions which had seen the economy growing at one of the fastest rates in the EU, with low unemployment, a fast rate of job creation, a narrowing deficit and lower taxes.
Malta, he said, had challenges, such as the environmental challenge, but it was proud to be implementing ideas which had their origin in European thought such as the Youth Guarantee, free childcare and measures to help people with disabilities.
“The window that opened with Malta’s membership of the European Union has brought in a wind of change,” he said.
This change was also changing the Maltese, as evidence by the belated introduction of divorce followed by legislation where Malta was among the first, including laws on civil unions, and gender identity.
On the EU’s future, he said that Malta felt that the EU should more actively encourage its member states to forge economic and political links with the rest of the world, as other countries were doing.
At the same time, EU member states should get closer together, while remaining individual countries.
Referring to the UK’s requests, he said there was no doubting the need for reform, based on freedom, the free movement of persons, products investment and services. One could discuss rules within those principles, but the principles remained, he said.
There were also grounds for reform in the Dublin Treaty on migration but it also needed to be ensured that other national competences remained, including those in the fiscal and taxation sectors.
Reform had to be flexible and practical but beneficial to all. One could not, for example, allow greater flexibility outside the Eurozone but then have tighter rules in the Eurozone, he said.
Opposition leader Simon Busuttil said the Maltese people had been rightly disappointed when the European Union was ‘indifferent’ as a constant stream of migrants arrived in Malta. Malta had been left on its own and its people were frustrated, and even angry at the lack of support.
It would be a mistake to ignore the people’s concerns, or to consider all those who raise concerns as being xenophobes and racist.- Simon Busuttil
“It would be a mistake to ignore the people’s concerns, or to consider all those who raise concerns as being xenophobes and racist. Unless we speak up, unless we act, it would be those who are truly racist or populist who will speak up, as is happening in several European countries,” Dr Busuttil warned.
He said the recent influx of Syrian migrants was an opportunity for the EU and other countries to do what they should have done years ago – to tackle and overcome this challenge rather than leave individual countries to fend for themselves.
This was the challenge which the Valletta summit faced. The participants had to show that they could no longer have globalised indifference. They needed to show that they understood what the people were facing, that in 2015 people could no longer be allowed to drown in the Mediterranean, that the European Union was able to guard its borders and that it could tackle this challenge as one.
Migration was an issue which no single country could tackle on its own. The only way forward was collective action. This was what the European ‘Union’ was all about, Dr Busuttil said.
