Updated April 21, 2015 4:37 p.m. ET
BRUSSELS—European leaders will gather here Thursday for a hastily convened summit to confront a growing humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, where more than 1,000 migrants are believed to have died in just over a week attempting the perilous crossing to Europe.
But their agenda includes already-tried plans that have previously failed because of the conflicting national interests of the 28 member states that make up the European Union. The crisis regularly pits the southern countries, where the migrants arrive, against the northern countries where they mostly want to go.
Leaders are expected to endorse and flesh out a 10-point plan put forward this week by the EU’s executive arm and backed by foreign and home affairs ministers in response to the latest and deadliest maritime disaster on Sunday, in which an estimated 850 people are believed to have died. Another 400 migrants are feared to have drowned days before in another shipwreck.
That list of measures bears similarities to an unsuccessful plan presented by the European Commission in October 2013, when another boat full of migrants sank off the Italian coast, killing more than 360 people.
The new plan envisions more money and equipment for an existing maritime border-surveillance mission, which deploys seven boats and vessels and two planes, and a proposed expansion in the range over which it operates—currently limited to just 30 miles from the Italian coast.
But even if the EU patrol budget is doubled, as some governments have proposed, it will likely be less than what was spent on a far-reaching search-and-rescue mission led by the Italian navy. That operation, called Mare Nostrum, was shut down last year and replaced by the current, smaller joint EU-Italian mission.
The current mission is primarily a border-patrol operation, falling short of the broader rescue mission that human-rights organizations have demanded.
“We were all hopeful for a leap forward, and what we’ve gotten is a tiny step,” said Judith Sunderland from Human Rights Watch.
“Having more vessels out in Mediterranean makes it more likely that migrants and asylum seekers in distress could be saved—that’s a good thing,” Ms. Sunderland said. “It took the deaths of 1,000 people in the space of a week to see EU leaders focusing on this, but it’s just not going to be enough.”
EU governments could also agree to relocate some of the migrants who arrive in Italy, Greece or Malta to other countries. Under current EU laws, migrants have to file for asylum in the EU country where they first set foot.
If they arrive and are fingerprinted in Italy and then move on to claim asylum in Germany, they are sent back to Italy. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, this has discouraged Italian authorities from processing migrants, allowing them to travel on to France and Germany. For this reason, Germany has insisted on including a proposal that EU countries must ensure fingerprinting of all migrants when they arrive on the Continent.
In return, an initiative that could start with 5,000 migrants being relocated to other countries would aim to give Italy and other southern countries some relief from the crush of migrants arriving there.
But a similar EU project in Malta dating back to 2008 failed to relocate migrants who arrived on the island, even though other EU member states had pledged to take them.
“Out of 2,000 migrants eligible for relocation, fewer than 100 were actually relocated under the EU pilot project,” said Roberta Metsola, a Maltese member of the European Parliament who worked as a legal adviser for the Malta’s government on migration issues.
More migrants, however, were relocated from Malta on a bilateral basis—200 to Germany, 100 to France.
“There seems to be less political will to do this as an EU project than there is to do it on a bilateral basis,” she said. “That could be boiled down to individual member states’ political scenarios—you have election debates that prevent you from risking the wrath of anti-immigrant populist parties.”
Manfred Weber, a German member of the EU parliament, said that while the Malta project didn’t work well, “this time it could be different because it was a real game-changer—the shock after all these deaths in the Mediterranean.”
Another major proposal is an operation to capture or destroy the ships used by human smugglers to transport migrants. But EU officials acknowledged there was broad disagreement over how this operation would work and what its mandate would be.
Write to Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com
BRUSSELS—European leaders will gather here Thursday for a hastily convened summit to confront a growing humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, where more than 1,000 migrants are believed to have died in just over a week attempting the perilous crossing to Europe.
But their agenda includes already-tried plans that have previously failed because of the conflicting national interests of the 28 member states that make up the European Union. The crisis regularly pits the southern countries, where the migrants arrive, against the northern countries where they mostly want to go.
Leaders are expected to endorse and flesh out a 10-point plan put forward this week by the EU’s executive arm and backed by foreign and home affairs ministers in response to the latest and deadliest maritime disaster on Sunday, in which an estimated 850 people are believed to have died. Another 400 migrants are feared to have drowned days before in another shipwreck.
That list of measures bears similarities to an unsuccessful plan presented by the European Commission in October 2013, when another boat full of migrants sank off the Italian coast, killing more than 360 people.
The new plan envisions more money and equipment for an existing maritime border-surveillance mission, which deploys seven boats and vessels and two planes, and a proposed expansion in the range over which it operates—currently limited to just 30 miles from the Italian coast.
But even if the EU patrol budget is doubled, as some governments have proposed, it will likely be less than what was spent on a far-reaching search-and-rescue mission led by the Italian navy. That operation, called Mare Nostrum, was shut down last year and replaced by the current, smaller joint EU-Italian mission.
The current mission is primarily a border-patrol operation, falling short of the broader rescue mission that human-rights organizations have demanded.
“We were all hopeful for a leap forward, and what we’ve gotten is a tiny step,” said Judith Sunderland from Human Rights Watch.
“Having more vessels out in Mediterranean makes it more likely that migrants and asylum seekers in distress could be saved—that’s a good thing,” Ms. Sunderland said. “It took the deaths of 1,000 people in the space of a week to see EU leaders focusing on this, but it’s just not going to be enough.”
EU governments could also agree to relocate some of the migrants who arrive in Italy, Greece or Malta to other countries. Under current EU laws, migrants have to file for asylum in the EU country where they first set foot.
If they arrive and are fingerprinted in Italy and then move on to claim asylum in Germany, they are sent back to Italy. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, this has discouraged Italian authorities from processing migrants, allowing them to travel on to France and Germany. For this reason, Germany has insisted on including a proposal that EU countries must ensure fingerprinting of all migrants when they arrive on the Continent.
In return, an initiative that could start with 5,000 migrants being relocated to other countries would aim to give Italy and other southern countries some relief from the crush of migrants arriving there.
But a similar EU project in Malta dating back to 2008 failed to relocate migrants who arrived on the island, even though other EU member states had pledged to take them.
“Out of 2,000 migrants eligible for relocation, fewer than 100 were actually relocated under the EU pilot project,” said Roberta Metsola, a Maltese member of the European Parliament who worked as a legal adviser for the Malta’s government on migration issues.
More migrants, however, were relocated from Malta on a bilateral basis—200 to Germany, 100 to France.
“There seems to be less political will to do this as an EU project than there is to do it on a bilateral basis,” she said. “That could be boiled down to individual member states’ political scenarios—you have election debates that prevent you from risking the wrath of anti-immigrant populist parties.”
Manfred Weber, a German member of the EU parliament, said that while the Malta project didn’t work well, “this time it could be different because it was a real game-changer—the shock after all these deaths in the Mediterranean.”
Another major proposal is an operation to capture or destroy the ships used by human smugglers to transport migrants. But EU officials acknowledged there was broad disagreement over how this operation would work and what its mandate would be.
Write to Valentina Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com
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