GENOA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th September, 2020) Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte called on the European Union on Thursday to step up the bloc's mechanisms for redistributing and repatriating migrants seeking refuge on the continent.
"We as the European Union need to govern migration flows, we cannot be subject to them ... We need to work to improve the European mechanisms to make them really efficient for repatriations. We need to have a European mechanism for repatriation, same as we need to have a working mechanism for obligatory redistribution of migrants," Conte said on the sidelines of the 7th Summit of the Southern Countries of the European Union (MED7) in the French coastal town of Porticcio near the city of Ajaccio.
The Italian prime minister further stressed the importance of ensuring transparency and respecting the international law by all the parties involved in the sea rescue missions, including the non-governmental organizations.
Some 17,000 asylum-seekers have made landfall of Italian shores since the beginning of the year, according to the Italian Interior Ministry. This is distinctly higher than the 4,600 that arrived in 2019 and looks to eclipse 2018's year-long tally of 19,500 arriving migrants.
