“Everyone in Europe has to accept that the old Dublin system is not sustainable. It cannot be that Greece and Italy have to bear all the burden alone, solely because their geographical position is such that refugees come to them." German Chancellor Angela Merkel said so in an interview with Welt am Sonntag. “This is why refugees must be distributed in solidarity”.
Merkel will be in Paris today for a summit on migrants with the French president Emmanuel Macron, the head of the Italian government Paolo Gentiloni and the Spanish premier Mariano Rajoy. Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al Serraj will also be there.
In addition to the fight against trafficking in human beings and the code of conduct imposed on NGOs operating in the Mediterranean, the meeting called by President Macron emphasized another of the Italian guidelines: concrete help to the countries of origin of streams. It is therefore no coincidence that the president of Niger Mahamadou Issoufou and the president of Chad Idriss Deby Itno were also invited to the first session of the quadrangle at the end of August.
"The Italian cooperation project with 14 local communities on the migratory routes in Libya is very timely", reads the summit document that Ansa anticipated. But not only. The endorsement to the Italian turnaround on the behavior of NGO ships that scour the lower Mediterranean is without shadows: “Rescue at sea remains a priority. Germany, France, Spain and the EU High Representative congratulate – reads the document – the measures taken by Italy in full compliance with international law. The Code of Conduct on Rescues at Sea is a positive step towards improving the coordination and effectiveness of rescues. The heads of state and government ask all the NGOs operating in the area to sign the code and respect it".
It remains to be seen what the countries of the north of the Union think of the new climate of collaboration, starting with Austria. And above all how seriously will the countries of the Visegrad Group (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia) take Merkel's statements on the need to redistribute migrants, after months of denouncing the EU's "blackmail and diktat" towards them on the theme of the common migration policy.
