EU Council Has a New Swedish Presidency with No Plans to Finalise Deal on Tackling Migration

Landing of migrants in Messina (Sicily) Over 400 people recovered at sea in various rescue
Gabriele Maricchiolo/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Chris Tomlinson

As Sweden takes on the Presidency of the European Council for the first six months of 2023, a Swedish ambassador has stated the country has no intentions of brokering a deal on curbing migration.

Sweden’s ambassador to the European Union, Lars Danielsson, has stated that the Swedish government, which took over the rotating six-month term of the Presidency of the European Council this month, will not be looking to try and broker a migration deal among EU member-states.

“We will definitely advance the work… with full force. [But] you will not see a completed migration pact during the Swedish presidency,” Deniaerlsson told the Financial Times newspaper, adding that he did not expect a migration deal until at least the spring of 2024.

The European Union has supposedly been working earnestly on a migration deal for years, and last year some member-states agreed to a voluntary deal in which they would take migrants from countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, which lie on the common external border of the bloc and thus receive a large portion of illegals entering the EU.

However, while the likes of Germany and France agreed to take in migrants, very few were actually transferred. According to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Germany and France took just 95 of the over 100,000 migrants who arrived in Italy last year.

“I believe that in Europe the same rights and duties of everyone should apply, I believe that the solution that can make everyone agree is to stop departures and defend European borders,” Meloni said.

Italy is not alone in criticising other European Union member states for not taking in migrants. The country was joined by several other Mediterranean states in March of last year find demanding other EU countries share the burden of mass migration.

Meloni was attacked by Emmanuel Macron’s France and Italy labelled an “enemy country” when she refused to allow an NGO migrant “taxi” ship to dock in Europe as a result of the lack of burden-sharing, which led to it eventually disembarking in Toulon instead.

Last year, the European Union saw over 308,000 known illegal entries in the first eleven months of the year, numbers not seen since the height of the migrant crisis in 2015 and 2016.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com.

 

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.