EU approves 1.8 bn euro refugee trust fund for Africa

Migrants arrive Thursday in Malmo, Sweden. However, Mensah said the country’s economic situation was not very promising.

Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar said his country expects about 30,000 new migrants to reach its borders.

Sweden – with the highest number of migrants per capita in Europe – was reintroducing border controls on Thursday, and its leader defended the move. “We must hurry, but without panic”. Leaders attended a signing ceremony to create a fund with at least 1.8 billion euros ($1.9 billion) to promote economic growth through electrification and agricultural projects.

Turkey is said to have dominated talks at the informal meeting in Malta.

The trust fund, unveiled at a summit with African leaders in Malta, consists largely of 1.8 billion put up by the European Commission, the EU executive, from the bloc’s central budget.

” Help Africa liberate itself from bad governance and poverty”.

A 17-page Action Plan sets out dozens of initiatives.

Erdogan repeatedly has highlighted the burdens Turkey is bearing by having to feed and house so many people. But he also acknowledged the details of raising the remaining $2.7 billion from individual member governments still needed to be settled.

Development analyst and renowned Ghanaian politician, Abu Sakara told DW, European leaders had opted for a quick-fix solution to the global migration crisis. He also noted that most migrants to Europe do not come from his continent. The money is meant to speed up the process of returning people to Africa who have not qualified for asylum and to discourage others who would not qualify from migrating. The European Commission has been authorized to negotiate similar deals with Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

“This includes, first and foremost, restoring external border control”.

Lofven said his European Union partners understand the decision, and he called for an overhaul of the rules governing Europe’s passport-free area.

“If we don’t act on time”, Cerar said, “this could cause a humanitarian catastrophe on the territory of Slovenia”. “That is obvious”, he said.

Finland, warning that it was “prepared to resort to tent and container accommodation”, also cautioned that there were not enough qualified nongovernmental organizations and companies to operate full-fledged reception centers for migrants.

Slovenia, one of the countries that is on the frontline of the crisis, has started building a barbed-wire fence on its border with Croatia. Both countries are already locked in an old territorial dispute dating from the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Their leaders met in Malta on Thursday to try to calm the dispute.

Economists had urged German authorities to accelerate procedures for consideration of requests for asylum, as more than a million immigrants could arrive in Germany this year.

In the light of the Eritrean government’s refusal to work with any aid workers over the years or with United Nation monitors, the European Union should develop a policy to impose sanctions on the country until it agrees to open its doors, Elsa Chyrum, an Eritrean activist and director of the NGO Human Rights Concern Eritrea, commented. A plan to relocate 160,000 refugees has so far only moved just over 100 people amid arguments over refugee quotas.