On Sunday, the European Union and Tunisia signed an agreement which among its main points foresees that the Tunisian authorities receive funds to stop the departures of migrants and asylum seekers who try to reach Italy’s coasts by sea. The text of the agreement has not been made public, but from the information reported in the newspapers and from how the prime minister Giorgia Meloni and the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen have talked about it, it seems to be modeled on similar, highly controversial agreements, already made in the past by the European Union with Turkey and Libya.
In a nutshell, the European Union undertakes to give money to a country from whose shores migrants and asylum seekers depart so that the authorities of that country, less bound by the reception of asylum seekers and respect for the human rights envisaged by European laws, stop those people by any means. For this reason, for some years now there has been talk of a practice of “externalisation of borders” by the Union.
In the short term these agreements have actually reduced the arrivals of migrants and asylum seekers: it happened immediately after the agreements made with Turkey in 2016 to reduce the flow of asylum seekers to Greece, and in 2017 after a similar agreement, on a smaller scale between Italy and Libya. Over time, the flows then returned to increase until they stabilized.
But regardless of the arrivals in Europe, migration and reception experts consider these agreements extremely controversial because they still cause enormous amounts of suffering and deaths: which, however, occur far from European territory, where finding information is much more difficult, and in places where European states are not held legally responsible for migrants.
Agreements of this type “prevent people from exercising their right to seek asylum, make them vulnerable to human rights abuses and inflict severe physical and psychological pain on them”, writes Jeff Crisp, migration expert at the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford. “Outsourcing then encouraged asylum seekers to undertake risky journeys and to engage with human traffickers and corrupt government officials.”
The first of these agreements was signed by the European Union with Turkey in 2016. Turkey was promised 6 billion euros over three years to host the approximately 3 million Syrians who had fled Syria since 2011 due to the civil war and the violence of Bashar al Assad’s regime, and prevent them from reaching Europe. In 2015 about 911 thousand peopleof which 500,000 Syrians, arrived in Greece and then tried to reach Western Europe through the so-called “Balkan route”.
“The implementation of the agreement between the European Union and Turkey may have contributed to the significant reduction in the number of people making the perilous journey to Greece”. he wrote recently the International Rescue Committee, one of the largest NGOs in the world dealing with migration, “but the price paid by those who did not make it to the European Union was unacceptable”.
According to UNHCR data, 155,000 migrants and asylum seekers have arrived in Greece by sea since 2017. In the same period of time, there were at least 877 deaths in the stretch of sea between Greece and Turkey (like any data on deaths at sea, this is a conservative estimate). In 2015, with a number of arrivals by sea 6 times higher, the recorded deaths were less: 799. When the sea borders are manned by a certain authority, the traffickers send the boats away at night or in more risky conditions, to elude the check.
A group of migrants and asylum seekers arrive aboard a rubber dinghy on the Greek island of Lesvos (AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic)
In recent years tens of thousands of people have been held in often inhumane conditions in detention camps on the Greek islands, in an administrative and bureaucratic gray area. Not to mention the Syrians forced to stay in Turkey, who cannot in any way obtain a visa to enter Europe and seek asylum. Turkey only partially recognizes the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on refugees, the main text which provides protection and guarantees for people seeking asylum in another country. The Syrians who fled to Turkey live as “B Series” citizens, with extremely limited rights e alarming data on child labour.
But the best-known example of externalization of borders, and which will probably be referred to for the agreement with Tunisia, is the one made with Libya by Italy during the centre-left government of Paolo Gentiloni.
Libya is a country in civil war for 12 years, full of militias and armed gangs, which is still not governed by a single government entity. In 2017, the Italian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding to reduce the arrivals of migrants by sea, which in 2016 had been 181,000, the highest number ever. The Memorandum was signed in February 2017 and had a three-year term. Since then it has always been renewed by the various governments and by the parliamentary majorities that have followed one another.
Although the Memorandum was a very generic text, it mainly served to train and supply means to the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, made up of private militias often in cahoots with human traffickers, and finance what the document called “reception centers” in Libya. In reality they are detention centers where torture and systematic rapes take place, as well as ransom requests. Libya has not signed the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on Refugees, which it therefore does not have to respect.
The project The Big Wall of the investigative news site IRPI Media has identified at least 59 projects financed by Italy and the European Union to the Libyan authorities from 2017 to today for border control – therefore for the maintenance of the centers and the so-called Libyan coast guard – for a total exceeding 400 million euros.
A group of migrants and asylum seekers intercepted by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard (AP Photo/Hazem Ahmed)
In June the UNHCR had recorded the presence of 44,468 refugees and asylum seekers in Libya. The real number is likely much higher: UNHCR has access to very few detention centers and the flow of migrants to Libya is continuous. The suffering of migrants detained in these centers is enormous. Those who manage to get to Europe tell of inhuman conditions in which murders of asylum seekers who do not pay or try to rebel take place on a daily basis, as well as rapes of women. In Bani Walid, a town southeast of the capital Tripoli known above all for human trafficking, the presence has been talked about for months of mass graves in which several migrants are allegedly buried.
We have some more certainty about the number of deaths at sea. According to IOM’s Missing Migrants project, the UN agency for migration, at least 22,000 people have died in the central Mediterranean since 2017. UNHCR estimates that between 2014 and 2016, around 505,000 migrants arrived in Italy by sea. According to Missing Migrants, there were at least 10,849 deaths during the same period. From 2017 to today, therefore in just under 6 years, there have been 437,297 arrivals, while 11,160 deaths. Proportionally, the dead have increased: travel has therefore become riskier, due to the aggressive patrolling of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, which pushes traffickers to travel at night or to fill boats even more to maximize profits from trips going to successful.
On paper, the 11,160 deaths recorded from 2017 to today are a smaller number than the 10,849 deaths of the three years of peak flow: but they do not tell the whole story of the consequences that the signing of the Memorandum had.
In recent years, several Italian governments have opposed the rescue activities in the Mediterranean by NGOs: many have interrupted their activities, and for this reason the number of data and information available on shipwrecks in the stretch of sea between North Africa and Italy is diminished. In short, the dead at sea could have been many more. To these must be added the people who arrived in Libya and then disappeared because they were killed in detention centers or rejected or repatriated or returned to their own country, on which there is no reliable data.
Despite the terrible conditions in Libya, Italy and the European Union have been equipping and funding for years the so-called Libyan Coast Guard to intercept and forcibly return migrants trying to get to Italy to Libya.
Interceptions at sea are permitted with a workaround. Since 2018, the European Union has recognized the responsibility of the Libyan Coast Guard for a SAR zone, i.e. a sea area in which a certain coastal state undertakes to maintain an active search and rescue service (in English search and rescue, abbreviated to SAR). The Italian and European coastal authorities could not bring migrant boats back to Libya: European laws prohibit the refoulement of people who intend to apply for asylum, like all people who try to arrive in Italy by sea. By handing over this task to the Libyan Coast Guard, however, from a legal point of view, Italy and European countries are not committing any violation.
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Without Italian and European funding, however, Libya would never have been able to systematically intercept the boats leaving from its coasts. The same approach will be used with Tunisia, which in 2023 became the first country of departure for migrant boats to Europe, overtaking Libya.
The agreement between the European Union and Tunisia provides for a loan of 105 million euros which will be used to enhance the capabilities of the Tunisian coastguard and allow a greater number of interceptions of migrant boats. According to a diplomatic source consulted by ANSAthe memorandum will involve the strengthening of the Tunisian Coast Guard “with 17 re-equipped boats and 8 new ones”.
At the moment the Memorandum with Tunisia does not provide for the opening of detention centers for migrants as happened in Libya. However, the conditions of the migrants who will be brought back to Tunisia by the Tunisian Coast Guard will still be worrying. For some months now, Tunisia’s authoritarian president Kais Saied has been placing the blame for the heavy economic and social crisis the country is experiencing on sub-Saharan migrants who have been working in Tunisia for years, using them as scapegoats.
Since then, sub-Saharan migrants have suffered continuous discrimination by Tunisians: many have been evicted from their homes and fired from their jobs, and also for this reason they are trying to reach Europe with unprecedented numbers.
In theory, Tunisia is a signatory country to the 1951 UN Geneva Convention on Refugees, but you have not fully applied it, and still today it does not have a law on the right to asylum. This gives the Tunisian security forces a leeway that the European ones do not have, similar to that of the so-called Libyan Coast Guard. In early July, Tunisian security forces had stopped about 1,200 sub-Saharan Africans in the coastal city of Sfax, from which most of the boats bound for Italy depart, and abandoned them without food or water in a desert area on the border with Libya.
It is plausible that the Memorandum signed with the European Union legitimizes other operations of this type, as well as, on a broader level, the governments on which the forces of order that apply the memorandum depend: the territorial governments and the armed militias in Libya, the authoritarian government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and the authoritarian one of Saied, today, in Tunisia.