Brussels unleashes criticism and hits the accelerator to apply the agreement signed this summer with the Government of Tunisia in order to help the country improve the control of its borders and act against the networks of human traffickers.
The European Commission announced yesterday that in the coming days it will deliver 127 million from the Community budget to accelerate the deployment of the plan and strengthen the capacity of the Tunisian authorities to control immigration. This aid “will help to deal with the urgent situation in Lampedusa”, assured the Community Executive regarding the Italian island, overwhelmed by the arrival of people from the African continent following the devastating floods recently recorded in Libya. Around 60 million euros will go directly to the Tunisian budget and around 67 million will go to finance a package of operational assistance for migration management.
Although Brussels maintains that the measures requested of the Tunisian Government “fully respect international law”, several member states have complained through the High Representative of the EU’s Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, for the lack of consultation on the agreement, and are reluctant to collaborate with the authoritarian regime of President Kais Saied. The divisions over this deal show that, eight years after the major refugee crisis from Syria and Iraq, immigration remains a highly divisive issue for the EU. According to Borrell, these differences can be destructive for the club, more so than Brexit, which has had no contagion effect. The differences on immigration “could be a dissolving force for the EU”, he says in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian. “There are some countries like Japan that don’t want to mix, that don’t want to mix” when “the paradox” is that the EU “needs immigrants because of its low population growth”.
Promoted by the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and her Dutch counterpart, Mark Rutte, the agreement was signed in July by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. The initiative has been highly contentious. The unrest in the capitals, the criticism of the oenagés of the capitals and the opening, this week, of an investigation by the European Ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, into the nature of the agreement, now add to this the publication of an Oxfam report on the management of EU development aid which denounces that in some cases it is used to finance anti-immigration programs, instead of devoting them to fighting programs against poverty Its experts have concluded that 6 of the 16 programs analyzed in Niger, Libya and Tunisia (valued at 667 million out of a total of 1 billion) violate the rules on development aid, which should be allocated to “the promotion of economic development and well-being” of the beneficiary countries.
