Marianne Arens
On Monday, the interior ministers of Germany, France, Malta and Italy agreed on an “emergency mechanism” in European Union (EU) refugee policy. Refugees rescued at sea arriving in Italy or Malta should in future be distributed to other EU countries within four weeks.
The Malta agreement, celebrated in the media as a “breakthrough” and a “European solution,” is intended not to end the dying in the Mediterranean, but merely to remove the tragedy from the public eye.
The mechanisms used to seal up Europe’s borders and that drive refugees to undertake life-threatening voyages across the sea remain in force. Several NGO ships remain seized, the EU’s “Operation Sophia” will not be resumed, cooperation with the so-called Libyan Coast Guard will continue and the development of camps in Africa will be pushed forward.
The agreement merely prevents ships with desperate refugees aboard from drifting for days or weeks at sea until the EU states have agreed on their distribution. Instead, a fixed distribution quota mechanism should ensure that they are allowed to land immediately.
In recent months, the scenes broadcast from such ships have increased resistance to the EU’s inhumane refugee policy. Sea Watch Captain Carola Rackete won international acclaim and was honoured for having brought 53 refugees to Lampedusa island after weeks of waiting at sea, despite a ban by the Italian authorities.
Above all, the Malta agreement is a cheap PR gesture designed to undermine resistance to inhumane refugee policies. All news stations produced reports showing the “Ocean Viking” arriving in a Sicilian port with 182 refugees after a week on the high seas. The ship of SOS Méditerranée and MSF had rescued 218 people from four different shipwrecks in just one week, including many women, small children and a newborn. After a week on the high seas, their situation on board had become absolutely unbearable.
The new agreement was announced on Monday night at the Maltese port fortress of St. Angelo. Also present were EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos and the interior minister of Finland, which currently holds the EU presidency. The agreement provides that people arriving from Libya to Italy or Malta via the Mediterranean will initially be distributed to Germany, France, Italy, Finland and Malta using an agreed quota mechanism.
However, there are no fixed numbers. In the barely justified hope that more EU countries will join, the “emergency mechanism” will be presented to an EU interior ministers’ meeting in Luxembourg on October 8.
The agreement is strictly limited geographically and applies only to refugees arriving from Libya rescued on the high seas. It does not apply to refugees who make their own way to Europe and are stranded in Malta, in Cyprus or on a Greek island.
Even for the people who fall under the agreement, the situation is far from secure. Isolated from the population, they are taken to Italian and Maltese reception centres, where they are first subjected to a security examination. The refugees are to be examined for links to terrorism, conducted by EU police teams, largely drawn from Germany. After that, they should be distributed to the EU countries within four weeks, and only then does the actual asylum process begin.
As everyone knows, this can easily end in deportation. In Germany, far more than half of all asylum seekers are rejected, and the rate is significantly worse for new applications.
German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (Christian Social Union, CSU) tried to sell the agreement as proof of a humane refugee policy. “I have always said that our immigration policy is also humane. We will not let anyone drown,” he claimed.
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