Mediterranean countries urged the European Union on Tuesday to provide more money to help them cope with an increasing flow of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
Southern EU countries are enduring a spike in migrants fleeing North Africa's conflict zones. Some 26,000 illegal migrants have taken boats across the Mediterranean to the Italian island of Lampedusa alone in recent weeks in what Italian officials have labeled a "human tsunami."
"We, the Mediterranean member states, which are on the front line and receive disproportionate pressure from the increasing, mixed migratory flows, shouldn't be left alone to deal with these challenges - and we cannot," Cypriot Interior Ministry Neoklis Sylikiotis told reporters after talks with officials from Spain, Italy, Greece and Malta.
Sylikiotis said the EU must be more specific on how it can help.
Italy's undersecretary to the Interior Ministry Alfredo Mantovano said his country has received some 30,000 migrants from Tunisia and 8,000 more from Libya over the last three months.
"This burden must be shared as much as possible throughout the European Union," Mantovano said.
The Cypriot minister said Mediterranean EU member states want to see the bloc set up a special, humanitarian emergency "solidarity fund" to help them deal with future migrant and asylum seeker inflows.
He also said they want swift agreement with the EU's border control agency Frontex on a common coastline patrol system stretching across the Mediterranean. They are also urging speedier negotiations on repatriation agreements with countries from which migrants originate and want the EU to adopt a common migration and asylum policy by 2012.
"This is not just a national problem but it is a European problem and it is a European problem which needs European instruments to solve," said Malta's Justice Minister Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici.
Greece's Public Order Minister Christos Papoutsis stated that the Dublin II Regulation is ineffective and needs changes because in its present form it creates serious problems and lays a disproportionately large burden on the countries at the EU external borders.
"Solidarity is a one-way street in facing the European problem of illegal migration. For example, 95 percent of the migrants entering Greece wish to move to other EU states," he said.
Papoutsis stressed that dealing with the issue is a common responsibility and therefore, a cohesive policy on migration is necessary, as well as, a consistent asylum policy which currently is absent.
However, he stated that social solidarity was expressed to Greece when Frontex was ordered to monitor the Greek borders, as well as, in the case of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) put in operation a month ago.
The issue has already caused some friction within the bloc. The Italians have taken the unusual step of issuing many of the Tunisians temporary residence permits and say that those papers allow the immigrants to go anywhere in the EU.
The Italian stance has infuriated Germany and France, the former colonial power where many of the Tunisians want to reunite with relatives, friends and co-workers.
source: AP, ANA
