Home Politics EU must agree on migration before Africa can help: UN agency

EU must agree on migration before Africa can help: UN agency

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North African countries can’t be expected to help the European Union manage migration when the EU itself can’t agree on the issue, according to a senior official from the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR.

At a dinner in Salzburg this week, EU leaders will attempt once again to find consensus on migration policy — an issue that has bitterly divided them in recent years. At their last summit in Brussels in June, they needed all-night negotiations to agree on a vaguely worded plan to set up “controlled centers” to process migrants in member countries and to explore the establishment of “regional disembarkation platforms” in North Africa.

But three months on, there is no sign of any such facilities being set up, either inside or outside the EU. And North African countries will not act until they have seen that the EU has a clear plan to make such a processing system work within its own borders, said Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR’s special envoy for the Central Mediterranean.

Europeans “cannot ask other countries to do things they are not ready to do themselves,” Cochetel told POLITICO by telephone from Geneva. “At the European level, what is important is they work first on the internal dimension, with the appropriate mechanism in terms of processing and in terms of distribution of refugees.”

At the heart of the EU’s disagreements is the so-called Dublin system that determines which countries are responsible for processing asylum claims and hosting those granted asylum. Six different presidencies of the Council of the EU have failed to come up with a plan to reform the system that meets with approval from all member countries.

Cochetel suggested that North African countries may be ready to host their own centers even if only a group of EU member countries can agree on a system for processing asylum claims and distributing refugees among themselves.

“We could have initially something short of an agreement on Dublin … We were encouraged to see over the summer … 11, 12 states, ready to share some of that responsibility in order not to leave Malta, Italy, or Spain alone,” Cochetel said. “We don’t need a full Dublin [reform], but we need good practical cooperation.”

Cochetel made clear that when he talked about North Africa being involved in a “mechanism” to receive, process and distribute refugees, he meant a range of countries from Morocco to Egypt — but not Libya. “It’s a different situation, it’s not a safe country of asylum, as far as we are concerned,” he said.

Cochetel noted most North African countries already had some mechanisms for dealing with migrants intercepted or rescued at sea. They “are not perfect” but could only become part of a genuine international network when the EU had its own system so that every rescue of a boat in international waters does not turn into “a pathetic dispute among European states,” he said.


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