Brussels rejects Italy’s criticism of inaction on the migration crisis | International

Brussels is very cautious about Italy’s decision to clarify the state of emergency to deal with the migration crisis and, incidentally, increase pressure on the European Union, which it has long accused of not doing enough in this matter. The European Commission has assured this Wednesday that it is “analyzing” everything that “implies” the Italian decision. Although the Community Executive admits that it is a “national competition”, it rejects the criticism of its gesture that it has received from Rome, recalling that it works “very actively” to face together with Italy and other countries in the area the “challenge ” migratory implied by the arrivals by sea of ​​thousands of migrants along the central Mediterranean route. Italy, Brussels insists, is one of the main beneficiaries of the EU’s migration efforts, which takes its particular “characteristics” very much into account, he says.

“The Commission has been very active and we have recognized the particularly disturbing situation, with the sharp increase in arrivals in the Central Mediterranean and to Italy”, confirmed the community spokesperson for the Interior, Anitta Hipper, at the Commission’s daily press conference. . At the same time, she has recorded that in November the Commissioner for the Interior, Ylva Johansson, presented an “action plan for the central Mediterranean” with 20 “specific” measures to reduce the irregular migratory flow in that area. A step that Brussels took, precisely, after a crisis between the Government of Giorgia Meloni and the French government of Emmanuel Macron, after Rome denied entry to the port to an NGO ship with hundreds of rescued immigrants.

It is not the only time that Brussels has directly questioned Rome. In fact, after the disaster in Calabria at the end of February, when 91 migrants died when their boat sank off the Italian coast, the president of the Commission herself, Ursula von der Leyen, sent a letter to Meloni in March focusing on the issue migration. Both leaders also spoke by phone at the end of that month, shortly before the last European summit of heads of state and government held in Brussels, in which, however, the migration issue was dealt with in passing. Meloni and Von der Leyen agreed in this case on the “urgency of acting at the migration level, in tune with Italy’s priorities,” the Italian government said after the talk.

Hipper has registered with respect to Italy “is one of the main beneficiaries” of the AMIF Fund (for migration, asylum and integration, in its acronym in English), to which the Commission has allocated, for the period 2021-2027, a total of 9,880 million euros. Italy will also be, he has added, “one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Mediterranean countries” in the next budget item of that fund. Brussels has Frontex and Europol agents deployed in Italy, in addition to having a specific “coordination mechanism”, the so-called workgroup Catania.

Since the arrival of the far-right Meloni government, Italy has been one of the countries that has pressed the most for a tightening of European migration policy, demanding, among other issues, that Brussels open up specifically to financing border walls or fences, something that Von der Leyen has repeatedly rejected.

The Commission has repeatedly called for accelerating the approval of the asylum and migration pact under discussion for more than two years. It is also urgent to speed up the refugee distribution mechanism approved almost a year ago now, the so-called Voluntary Solidarity Mechanism, through which last summer, 23 States -19 EU members and four associated countries- pledged to help the Mediterranean nations that receive the main flow of migrants by sea. But said agreement has not yet started: in fact, as the Commission revealed this Wednesday, only 884 relocations have been carried out to date, 512 of them from Italy. A pyrrhic figure when, in the last few days alone, more than 3,000 people have landed on the Italian coasts, according to Italian media. “We need to speed up the relocations,” admits Brussels.

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