Italy is organizing a conference on development and migration this Sunday to which all the countries bordering the Mediterranean are invited. Not only the so-called “first entry” European countries but also the countries of arrival, transit and origin of migrants.
3 mins
From our office in Brussels,
Italy is taking a leading position in Europe on the migration issue. In any case, this is the ambition displayed by the President of the Italian Council, Giorgia Meloni. The conference of this Sunday, July 23, bringing together the countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the countries of the Middle East, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa or the States of the Gulf Cooperation Council is proof of this.
Since coming to power last October, Giorgia Meloni’s European partners have seen her on two fronts. First, she has multiplied statements about migration, one of the central themes of her campaign and that of her coalition partners being the closing of Italian borders to migrants. It is on this front in particular that the diplomatic clashes with France occurred, in particular when it accused Paris of exploiting Africa via seigniorage on the CFA franc.
Promoting his Mattei plan…
Then there is a second front: Giorgia Meloni’s desire to see Italy take the reins of cooperation between the EU and Africa. This is what she put forward in December at the previous conference in Rome, that of “Mediterranean dialogues”. This is where the President of the Italian Council launched her “Mattei plan”.
It is this famous Mattei plan which is again put forward here, the give-and-take between political cooperation and economic cooperation. Giorgia Meloni chose to baptize this plan with the name of Enrico Mattei, the one who presided over the creation of the energy company Eni and who, at the time, had established fairer commercial conditions for producing countries. This is what she is proposing this Sunday during her conference on development and migration, which some NGOs consider rather as an exchange ” development versus migration “. The human rights monitoring NGO Human Rights Watch even calls it a conference ” anti-migration “.
Read alsoAccording to Unicef, 289 children died crossing the Mediterranean in 2023
… to Africa
Despite everything, Giorgia Meloni seems to have succeeded in convincing people of the interest of his Mattei plan. She took her pilgrim stick to sell her Mattei plan in Africa. We have seen her, for example, in Ethiopia praising a ” virtuous model of collaboration and growth between the EU and African States. And especially among the participants of this Roman conference this Sunday figures in the foreground the Tunisian president Kaïs Saïed. He signed the July 16 a memorandum of understanding with the European Union where his country undertakes to fight against illegal migration in exchange for a vast cooperation plan. Concretely, Tunisia will receive aid of 105 million euros to combat irregular migration.
So Giorgia Meloni manages to convince both on the African continent but also on the European continent since it is she, the first, who went alone to Tunis to meet Kaïs Saïed, being accompanied by her Batavian counterpart Mark Rutte and Ursula von der Leyen. From now on, the EU describes the memorandum of understanding with Tunisia as a model for future agreements with Mediterranean countries.
Tunisia strongly criticized by NGOs
With our correspondent in Tunis, Lilia Blaise
This summit in Rome is not going well with Tunisian civil society. It comes at a time when the country has been heavily criticized for its treatment of sub-Saharan migrants for several weeks. About 150 Maghreb and African NGOs met Thursday and Friday in Tunis ahead of the summit. ” For us, the Rome summit is part of the continuity of the war on migrants, the war against human mobility, and it is a summit that will try to legitimize inhumane migration policies towards migrants and refugees and asylum seekers “, explains Romdhane Ben Amor, spokesperson for the Forum for Economic and Social Rights, the association behind the event which gave rise to a declaration in solidarity with migrants against European migration policies.
The World Organization against Torture, which has issued the alert on the deterioration of the condition of several migrants forcibly transported to the Libyan border, wants to send a humanitarian message, according to Hélène Legeay, legal director of the office in Tunisia: ” We obviously expect from the Rome Summit that the states of the European Union address as a priority the issue of respect for human rights by Tunisia in particular, and that the migration policy and the massive crimes perpetrated by the Tunisian authorities are also denounced. »
Read alsoTunisia: “Security forces mistreat sub-Saharan migrants”, accuses the NGO Human Rights Watch