Malta Says It Will Accept Stranded Ship if Others Take In Migrants, Too

ROME — A ship carrying more than 200 African migrants rescued from the Mediterranean last week will be allowed to dock in Malta if other European countries agree to share the responsibility of taking them in, the Maltese government said Tuesday.

The offer echoes calls in Italy and Spain for other states to help deal with the arrival of thousands of migrants from Africa, and end the current European Union policy of processing asylum-seekers in the first country in which they arrive.

The ship, the MV Lifeline, which is run by the German charity Mission Lifeline, rescued 234 people from two rubber dinghies off the western coast of Malta on Thursday, but was unable to dock when both Malta and Italy turned it away.

As fraught negotiations between Malta and its mainland counterparts took place throughout Tuesday, the Maltese government said that four EU countries had agreed to accept some of the migrants on the ship, while another two were “evaluating the case.”

Malta did not identify the countries, but Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy announced that Italy would be one of them.

Italy’s offer, he said, was “consistent with the cornerstone of our immigration proposal, according to which whoever disembarks on Italian, Spanish, Greek or Maltese shores disembarks in Europe.”

By taking a quota of migrants, “Italy is doing its part,” Conte said, adding that he hoped that “other European countries would do the same.”

President Emmanuel Macron of France, who met with Pope Francis on Tuesday to discuss issues including migration, announced in a news conference that France would also take in migrants from the Lifeline.

But Axel Steier, a Mission Lifeline founder, expressed concern on Tuesday evening that the ship had not yet received permission to enter any Maltese port.

“We have medical cases that are getting worse” and could require evacuation, he said in a telephone interview. “We can wait until everyone requires evacuation in a bad way, but that is not a solution.”

The dithering over the migration crisis is pushing Europe toward a “worse society,” he added. “We need that to change now.”

The rejection of the ship was the second time this month that migrants rescued at sea by nongovernmental organizations were denied access to a European port, as European countries struggle to agree on a common immigration policy.

Earlier in June, a ship with around 630 migrants aboard, the Aquarius, operated by a French aid group, was also denied access to Italian ports. After long negotiations, the migrants were accepted by Spain.

In recent years, many thousands of asylum-seekers have drowned while attempting the perilous Mediterranean crossing on rickety boats managed by unscrupulous traffickers.

On Sunday, while in Brussels for an informal EU meeting on migration, Conte announced a 10-point strategy intended to share the burden of mass migration among all European nations. Countries with Mediterranean borders — like Italy, Malta, Greece and Spain — currently bear the brunt of arrivals from Africa.

With a two-day summit meeting on migration due to begin in Brussels on Thursday, humanitarian groups worry that “engineered panic and fearmongering by European politicians over migration is steering the EU toward very dangerous waters,” Judith Sunderland, an associate Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Tuesday.

“EU leaders should stop using women, men and children on rescue boats as political pawns,” Sunderland said. “Refusing to let rescued people land, ignoring both basic decency and international norms, could discourage rescue at sea and put lives at risk.”

Italy’s previous leadership, a center-left government defeated in elections in March, also clamored for greater support from the European Union. But the new populist government led by the anti-immigrant League and the Five Star Movement has taken a harder line on sea rescues.

Conte said in a statement that he and Prime Minister Joseph Muscat of Malta had agreed that the Lifeline would be “investigated to ascertain its nationality” — it has a Dutch flag but is run by a German charity — and determine whether its crew had breached any international laws.

Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini — the bombastic leader of the League who parlayed growing resentment against immigrants to sizable electoral gains for his party — chalked up Malta’s proposal for the Lifeline migrants as another victory.

“After the NGO Aquarius was sent to Spain, now the NGO Lifeline will go to Malta, where this illegal ship will be seized,” he wrote on Twitter. “The doors are open for women and children who are really escaping war, for all others no.”

Speaking to journalists earlier in the day, Salvini reiterated that ships run by humanitarian agencies would “never again dock in an Italian port.”

But another impasse was resolved early Tuesday morning when a Danish cargo ship carrying 113 migrants was allowed to dock in the Sicilian port of Pozzallo, several days after it first sought permission.

Salvini said the Italian authorities had allowed the ship, the Alexander Maersk, to dock because the migrants had been rescued at the request of the Italian coast guard. And, he added, “because we have a good heart, unlike Macron” — a jab at the French president, with whom Salvini has been sparring over immigration policies. The mayor of Pozzallo, Roberto Ammatuna, said that sudden bad weather on Monday had increased concerns about the ship, and that he had appealed to Salvini to let the boat dock.

The people were taken to the city’s migrant center, where they were identified and provided with basic assistance. They will be shuttled to other centers in Italy later in the week.

This year, fewer than 3,000 migrants have arrived in Pozzallo, the mayor said, compared with 21,000 in 2016 and about half that amount last year. “There’s no real emergency, but it’s perceived as an invasion,” he said. “I don’t share this concern, but then I’m just the mayor of a small town.”

According to Human Rights Watch, arrivals to Italy, which are primarily from Libya, are down 78 percent compared with 2017.

Mauro Palma, Italy’s ombudsman for the rights of detained persons or those deprived of their liberty, had pressed the Italian authorities to allow the Maersk to land. As the ship was in Italian waters, “the migrants were de facto detained,” a breach of national and international policies, Palma said in an interview.

“These vessels are not just in the cross hairs of politicians, but also those who protect human rights,” he said, “and not just humanitarian organizations, but also institutions of the state.”