Some 1,200 migrants have arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa in the last 24 hours and, along with them, the body of a woman who died in a new shipwreck.
Overnight, 885 migrants on 21 barges landed on the small island, a few miles off the African coast, while on Wednesday 13 boats with 470 people were rescued by Coast Guard boats.
These are people from Chad, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Liberia and Gambia, who were taken to the island’s reception center, which is once again suffering from overcrowded as it can accommodate only 300 migrants.
According to the media, the novelty is that most of the boats had left from Sfax, in Tunisia.
During the early morning there was also a shipwreck, the second in a few hours in the area, and twenty migrants were rescued, all from Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, while the body of a young woman who drowned when the ship sank was recovered.
Hours earlier, the Coast Guard had rescued 38 migrants, including a minor and eleven women, who had also fallen into the water after the boat they were on capsized.
Until today, 15,823 migrants have arrived on the Italian shores this year, compared to 5,976 in the same period of 2022, according to data from the Ministry of the Interior.
The Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, was satisfied this Wednesday with the response of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to her requests to seriously address the issue of migration after the tragedy in Calabria, where at least 72 people died.
Meloni will hold a council of ministers this afternoon in which issues related to migration will be discussed in Cutro (south), the town where the migrant boat sank in which at least 72 people died, eleven days after the tragedy and after the numerous criticisms it has received for not having visited the place before.
Sweden, the country that presides over the Council of the European Union this semester, hopes that the Member States will adopt next June “decisions” that allow the approval of the future European Pact on Migration and Asylum in the first months of 2024, an “ambitious” objective but that the presidency considers achievable.
The Swedish Minister of Migration, Maria Malmer Stenergard, said upon her arrival at a Community Interior Council that is being held today in Brussels that there is a “impulse” for this negotiation in the EU. “We are doing everything we can to comply with the roadmap of the Council (countries) and the European Parliament, and that means that we aim to have a decision in June. It is ambitious but so are we,” she said.
A few months ago, the European institutions drew up a roadmap and promised to try to close the European Migration and Asylum Pact before the end of the current European legislature, that is, in the first half of 2024.
Since the European Commission presented that pact in September 2020, progress in the negotiations has been slow and some of the most controversial elements remain to be decided.
For example, the Swedish minister acknowledged today that the “crucial” and “most difficult” point concerns the balance between “solidarity” (of the countries less directly affected by the arrivals of irregular migrants) and “responsibility” (of front-line states).
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