EU:Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini strongly criticised EU states for not doing enough to tackle a wave of illegal migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. Jamie Smythreports from Brussels
At the launch of a Green Paper on a common European asylum policy, Mr Frattini said EU ministers had offered 115 boats and 25 helicopters for the EU border force Frontex but had so far failed to deliver.
"Member states promised, in writing. They wrote letters signed by ministers to me and to Frontex. Now we need on the sea, in the air, helicopters and so on," said Mr Frattini, who criticised the lack of solidarity among EU states toward asylum and migration issues.
Mr Frattini's remarks follow the recovery of 18 bodies of migrants floating in the sea south of Malta last Friday. The gruesome discovery by the French navy came just days after a Maltese ship refused to rescue 27 shipwrecked Africans who were clinging to tuna fishing nets for three days. An Italian ship finally rescued the migrants while Malta and Libya argued over who should be responsible for the rescue.
Mr Frattini warned yesterday that this summer would prove as tragic as last summer in the Mediterranean, when EU officials estimate that thousands of Africans drowned while attempting to enter Europe illegally on makeshift vessels.
"What is very important is a substantial co-operation and practical solidarity, which is so far not sufficient concerning refugees," said Mr Frattini, who strongly criticised Malta at the weekend for failing to pick up the shipwrecked African migrants.
Malta's foreign minister, Michael Frendo, told French newspaper Le Figaro that the criticism was "too hasty, misinformed and badly directed". He said he would ask other EU states to show solidarity and take in quotas of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean at an EU interior ministers' meeting next week in Luxembourg.
This concept of boosting solidarity when it comes to refugees is central to the European Commission's Green Paper on a common EU asylum system. The paper aims to harness ideas on how to harmonise asylum laws in Europe, which are currently different in all 27 EU member states.
For example, there is no single asylum procedure in EU states which means that a person applying for asylum in Britain could face very different assessment and treatment than a person applying in Sweden. This meant that Britain refused 88 per cent of asylum applications from Iraqis in 2005, Ireland 84 per cent and Sweden just 40 per cent.
The Green Paper floats the idea of setting up a fair "burden sharing" system for asylum seekers in EU states and a single EU asylum procedure.
States such as Ireland, Britain and Germany are expected to approach any attempt by the commission to harmonise asylum policy with extreme caution. But states affected directly by increasing migration flows from Africa such as Spain, France and Italy are more likely to support an integrated policy that shares the burden of asylum seekers.