Meanwhile, Tajani has relaunched a sort of “Marshall Plan” for Africa that includes deals with Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, Niger and other Sahel countries. Agreements modeled on Turkey, for which the European Union has allocated 6 billion euros, to stop migration on the Balkan route, which would allow migratory flows to be managed directly in the countries of origin and create hotspots in Africa, as several times by proposed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. From there, a selection of asylum applications could be started and migrants distributed evenly among the 27 states of the European Union.
Another proposal that is being worked on and that will probably be on the table of the summit of European foreign ministers is the elaboration of a European code of conduct for NGOs, possibly starting from the text presented back in 2017 by the then Minister of the Italian Interior, Marco Minniti, who found the support of most of the countries of the Union, including France. At the time, only a few organizations signed the document. Among them were neither Doctors Without Borders nor Sos Méditerranée, the two NGOs currently operating their respective ships in the Mediterranean.
Rules envisaged in the code included, for example, the obligation not to enter Libyan waters, “not to engage in communications or to send light signals to facilitate the disembarkation and boarding of boats carrying migrants”, but also the obligation “not to transfer those rescued to other ships”. Finally, the willingness to let judicial police officers on board.
More generally, Italy has already called on Europe to oblige the states that fly the flag to humanitarian organizations’ boats to take care of the redistribution of migrants rescued in the Mediterranean by their respective vessels. A proposal laid out in black and white in a joint statement between Italy, Malta, Cyprus and Greece and endorsed by Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi himself, who just reiterated that “we will only enter our country legally”.