on smugglers,” said the EU’s top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, who was in Malta to attend the funeral of 24 migrants who perished at sea.
So far, that has been a halfhearted skirmish, lamented Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the EU parliament’s liberal ALDE group.
He complained the EU border operation Frontex had only two helicopters and seven ships in the Mediterranean. “We need a multitude out there,” he said.
The draft statement also called for “a first voluntary pilot project on resettlement, offering at least 5,000 places to persons qualifying for protection.”
That resettlement plan would amount to about half of the number which arrived in just the last week and a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands likely to arrive this year.
Here too a continental rift was already obvious, with countries like Germany, Sweden, France and Italy dealing with a disproportionate number of asylum requests while many eastern member states hardly take any. Five of the 28 member states are handling almost 70 per cent of the migrants coming in.
Cameron, two weeks away from a national election in which immigration is a major issue, said Britain was not in the front line to take more migrants. British vessels would take migrants “to the nearest safe country, mostly likely Italy,” he said.
In a joint statement, the UN’s top refugee and migration officials called for an EU-wide resettlement plan and for beefing up the capacity of front-line countries Greece, Italy and Malta to receive more migrants.
The draft statement also proposes cutting the time needed to process would-be migrants, which can now take up to a year before a person is deemed legitimate to stay, to as little as two months.
Some lawmakers are concerned that the leaders may stump up rescue assets while the media spotlight is on their summit, but that commitments to solidarity could quickly fade away, as they have in the past.
“I fear that what will happen ... is that they will try to water down a few of the points and the actual reason why they are meeting — to urgently seek solutions to what is happening today — will not be the focus of the deal,” Roberta Metsola, the leading EU parliament lawmaker on migration, told the AFP.