EU leaders ‘will allow just 5,000 migrants who cross the Mediterranean to settle in Europe’

Coffins are carried by soldiers during a funeral service for 24 migrants who drowned while trying to reach the Southern coasts of Italy over the weekend in the latest tragedy to hit the Mediterranean.
Coffins are carried by soldiers during a funeral service for 24 migrants who drowned while trying to reach the Southern coasts of Italy over the weekend in the latest tragedy to hit the Mediterranean.
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Daily Mail .cm :
Just 5,000 migrants will be allowed to resettle in Europe – with more than 150,000 due to be sent back home – under emergency measures set to be agreed by EU leaders, it was reported yesterday .
A leaked draft summit statement reportedly indicates that the vast majority who survive boat trips across the Mediterranean will be denied refugee status under a new rapid-return programme.
The document also scuppers hopes of a major expansion of search-and-rescue operations despite mounting pressure over the humanitarian crisis that has seen 1,700 die in the last week alone.
Instead it says immediate preparations should begin to ‘undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers’.
Yesterday ‘s summit was called after around 900 migrants were feared to have drowned when their boat capsized at the weekend off the coast of Libya in what the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said was the ‘deadliest incident’ it had recorded in the Mediterranean.
European leaders have been widely criticised since the decision last year to end the Italian navy’s Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation and replace it with the far more limited EU Operation Triton, patrolling the Italian coast.
But the summit statement only confirms the decision by EU ministers earlier this week to double funding in 2015 and 2016 for the existing Operation Triton and Operation Poseidon border-surveillance operations.
On Monday, the EU set out a 10-point action plan to prevent more deaths, including increasing the financial resources of Frontex, the border agency which runs Operation Triton, and an extension of Triton’s operational area, currently within 30 miles of the Italian coast.
But the head of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, warned that Triton could not be a full search and rescue operation in the way that Mare Nostrum was.
‘In our operational plan, we cannot have provisions for proactive search and rescue action,’ he told The Guardian.
‘This is not in Frontex’s mandate, and this is, in my understanding, not in the mandate of the European Union.’
The recommendations also stop short of calls by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott for Europe to follow his government’s lead by deploying military forces to turn migrant boats back.
‘The only way you can stop the deaths is in fact to stop the boats,’ Abbott said.
Australia’s policy has drastically reduced the number of asylum-seekers arriving on its soil and deaths at sea but has been attacked as undermining the principle of asylum.
Britain’s Ukip leader Nigel Farage backed those calls, saying said ‘millions’ of refugees could arrive on boats in Europe over the next few years unless they are intercepted and turned back now.
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