RABAT: African states will call for more cash and cooperation when more than 60 ministers from Africa and the EU gather next month to forge a strategy to fight illegal migration, the conference’s chief organiser says.

Television footage of illegal African migrants, including women clutching babies, storming the razor-wire borders of the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla last year spurred European leaders to scramble for ways to stop the migrant flow.

Harrowing images of thousands of parched, exhausted young Africans washing ashore in flimsy boats on Spain’s Canary Islands this year added urgency to establish greater international cooperation to combat clandestine migration.

“The Africa-Europe conference in Rabat on July 10-11 will be the first global initiative to forge a balanced approach which combines shared responsibility, development and solidarity to regulate the migration flow,” said Youssef Amrani, chief organiser.

Amrani, a senior official at the Moroccan Foreign Ministry, told Reuters in an interview the conference aimed to draw up a joint plan.

“The conference will come up with a balanced strategy as it brings together for the first time countries of migration origin, transit and destination,” he added.

Morocco and other African states will ask for more EU development aid to create more jobs in poor countries whose young people are leaving to seek a better future in Europe.

“Without giving a priority to development in Africa, there will be no solution or end to illegal migration. Synergies between the EU, the United Nations and other countries and international bodies are needed to focus efforts on Africa’s economic develpment,” Amrani added.

African states will ask for new “financing instruments” from the EU, and will accept EU demands for stronger security cooperation on land, sea and in the air to crack down on migrant smuggling networks, he said.

African governments are expected to meet EU migrant repatriation and readmission demands and the European bloc is likely to accept new measures to facilitate legal migration, he added.

In a sign of the global scale of the migration issue, Amrani said countries including Ukraine, Mexico and Russia would attend as observers ahead of the UN special meeting on migration in September.

Neighbouring Algeria will stay away from the meeting, although it is a desert corridor for illegal migrants crossing from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe via Morocco and Libya.—Reuters