GENEVA: If Europe takes a more anti-migrant stance following upcoming elections it could impact the willingness of countries globally to host refugees and create chaos, a UN official warned on Tuesday.

Vincent Cochetel, the UN refugee agency’s special envoy for the central and western Mediterranean, voiced concern that a more hardline approach to migrants and refugees in Europe could influence countries that have long provided desperately needed refuge to people fleeing crises, to rethink their policies.

“Europe serves as a major role model,” he told reporters in Geneva, urging the continent to serve as a good example “allowing us to make progress on protection elsewhere in the world”.

“The way that Europe treats its refugees is something that is watched,” he pointed out.

The world body also slams Italy-Albania deal to house migrants in a former military airbase

“If European values around refugee protection collapse, we will see the same tendency elsewhere.” Cochetel warned that would lead to “less well-managed (migratory) move­ments, a lot more movements in all directions, not only towards Europe”.

His comments came as opinion polls have predicted that nationalist, Eurosceptic and far-right parties are primed to do well in European Parliament elections held between June 6-9.

Cochetel stressed the need to highlight to Europeans that the number of refugees and migrants arriving in European countries is “completely manageable”. He pointed out that when millions of Ukrainians fled their war-torn country, European nations handled the influx “without great difficulty”.

He acknowledged that “there is always more empathy for refugees from the neighbourhood than for [those] that come from further away and seem different”.

It was therefore vital, he said, to explain why people are arriving from countries like Sudan, which for more than a year has been ravaged by a brutal civil war. Euro­pean countries, he said, “should prepare, but not in panic”.

Cochetel also emphasised that the vast majority of people on the move globally were not going to Europe. He presented a new report on Tuesday highlighting shocking needs and risks facing refugees and migrants along migration routes in Africa and elsewhere.

“The horrors faced by refugees and migrants along these routes are unimaginable,” he said, urging efforts to pinpoint the most used and most dangerous routes and to ensure humanitarian protection and other services are provided.

Italy’s migrant centres

Construction workers in Alba­nia are working hard to transform a former military airbase into an Italian-run migrant centre ahead of a progress check by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni this week.

Meloni is expected to visit the former airfield in Gjader on Wednesday — days before elections to the European Parliament — as bulldozers are levelling the soil to accommodate new white containers arriving from Italy.

While UN officials have criticised the Italy-Albania deal, the European Commission has said it does not appear to breach EU law as it falls outside its jurisdiction.

Italy agreed to a deal with Albania to set up the centre in Gjader and another in the seaside town of Shengjin 20 kilometres away to host migrants rescued at sea by Italian boats while their asylum applications are processed.

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2024