Macron will not solve the migrant crisis, and Europe is no closer to adopting a coherent migration policy.

Rishi Sunak met with Emmanuel Macron on Monday at the 27th annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh. The British Prime Minister showed himself to be "confident and optimistic" regarding the speedy settlement of the migrant crisis that also affects the English Channel.

However, according to Gavin Mortimer, the author of the British conservative Spectator

If the British prime minister is serious about finding a solution to the migrant crisis, then he will need more than the cooperation of the French president: he will have to conduct negotiations with the EU, otherwise also with the Albanian government and Giorgia Meloni.

Some 40,000 migrants have crossed the English Channel in small boats so far this year, but more than twice that number have arrived in Italy in the Mediterranean, and that number is expected to rise to six figures before the end of the year. The number of migrants landing on Italian soil has increased dramatically this year, which is largely due to the ships of German NGOs, which for years transported tens of thousands of migrants from Africa to Italy. In recent days, two such ships, the Rise Above and the Humanity 1, have demanded to dock in Sicily with hundreds of migrants on board, as have two Norwegian ships with another 800 migrants on board.

The ships arrived two weeks after Meloni - who was supported by many voters precisely because he promised to restore order on Italy's borders - was officially sworn in as prime minister.

The German vessel Rise Above with 89 people on board was granted permission to dock in southern Italy's Reggio Calabria on Tuesday, while three other NGO vessels are illegally in Italian waters, according to authorities. The Ocean Viking left for France on Tuesday evening. Xavier Lauth, the operational director of SOS Méditerranée, which operates the Norwegian-flagged ship, announced on his microblog page that the Ocean Viking left the port of Catania in Sicily with 234 "shipwrecks" on board, and is expected to arrive in the waters of Corsica on Thursday.

Some EU member states appear to be tacitly supporting the activities of the NGO ships, notably Germany and France, which have expressed concern over Meloni's election victory.

"The EU can only function if we try to apply common solutions suitable for everyone," Katharina Barley, vice-president of the European Parliament and member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's Social Democrat party, reacted to Meloni's election victory. "It's a compromise. Our experience with such governments is that they do not compromise at all," he added.

In recent days, both Germany and France have demanded that Italy respect international law (!) and accept ships carrying migrants, and some Western media have accused Meloni of "irritating" his European partners by refusing to accept migrants.

And Rome hardly likes that. As Meloni has previously pointed out, France bears much of the blame for Europe's migrant crisis, having helped remove Colonel Gaddafi from power in 2011, which plunged the region into chaos. And in 2015, Angela Merkel made the arbitrary decision to open Europe's borders to an estimated at least 1.3 million refugees and migrants.

Giuseppe Loffreda, known as an expert in maritime law, told the daily newspaper Il Messaggero that the people taken on board by NGO ships in international waters "are not shipwrecked, but migrants". He added: according to international conventions, they would be considered eligible for admission if they were granted rescue in the SAR zones belonging to the countries. He noted that NGO boats are vessels designed to "supply and accommodate" people taken on board.

In the same 2018 speech, when Meloni referred to France's intervention in Libya, he also mentioned a series of incidents in 2018 in which French police were filmed deporting captured illegal immigrants back to Italian territory. At the time, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini sent Italian police to patrol the border and issued a warning to Macron on Twitter:

"The numerous abuses by the French authorities will have consequences, because they took advantage of the good faith of our police officers."

Last Thursday, the humanitarian NGO SOS Méditerranée appealed to the governments of France, Greece and Spain to help find a port for migrants in distress. The same organization already made a similar request in September 2018, but then France did not allow the ship in question to dock in Marseille. "There are European rules," explained the government spokesman. "For now, France has said no, because if we want to pursue a coherent migration policy, we must respect European rules."

Four years on, and as Rishi Sunak will discover in the coming months, Europe is no closer to adopting a coherent migration policy; he simply expects Italy (and Hungary, and all relevant countries in the Balkans - ed.) to bear the lion's share of the burden.

There is neither the courage nor the will to deal with the decade-long crisis, and the EU does not even have the intelligence to understand the consequences of its cowardice.

Featured Image: © Patrick Bar/SOS MEDITERRANEE