Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will travel to Tunisia next Wednesday to discuss the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean with Tunisian President Case Said.
Strengthening border controls in Tunisia will be one of the issues discussed following a memorandum signed between the European Union (EU) and Tunisia last July, which provided Tunisia with 150 million euros to curb illegal emigration.
In the first quarter of this year, 11,055 people landed in Italy along the Central Mediterranean route, down 60% from the same period in 2023, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). UNHCR also recorded the deaths of at least 340 people attempting to cross the Mediterranean, which fell between January and March due to weather conditions.
However, in the first week of April, 8 thousand people arrived in Italy and managed to cross the border from Tunisia.
However, the Tunisian National Guard announced that it had intercepted ships with 942 people on board heading to Europe and recovered two bodies at sea. Tunisian police did not specify the dates or coordinates of these events in a statement published on Friday.
The non-governmental organization Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, for its part, says that European and Tunisian border authorities have prevented 14,457 people from illegally landing in Europe since the beginning of this year and were forced to return to Tunisia.
A Tunisian NGO believes that Tunisia is not a “safe country” to return to, given the arbitrary arrests and forced expulsions of sub-Saharan African migrants into desert regions on the borders of Algeria and Libya without access to any aid or water and food .
Tunisian President Kais Said in February 2023 accused “hordes” of sub-Saharan migrants of threatening the “Arab-Muslim” identity of the Tunisian state and of being part of a plot to change the country’s demographics.
European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson has defended the “good results” of the agreement, but in March the European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution requiring the Commission to justify the reasons for the special memorandum signed with Tunisia and to clarify any procedural issues. violations and financing.