(AP) Less than a week after a deadly migrant shipwreck off Italy, five European Union countries on the Mediterranean Sea pushed back Saturday against their northern neighbors for not accepting asylum-seekers under a voluntary relocation initiative.
The ministers responsible for migration policy in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta and Spain met in Malta’s capital, Valletta, ahead of an EU ministerial meeting in Brussels next week on migration. The countries started working together as the MED 5 in 2021 to confront the challenges of illegal migration.
Greek Minister of Migration and Asylum Notis Mitarachi told reporters that just 1% of the migrants who arrived in those front-line nations along the EU’s southern border last year were taken in by other EU members under a voluntary relocation program.
