The EU should not be allowed to sign off on a controversial migration pact with Tunisia without intervening over human rights breaches and a “breakdown” in its democracy, European parliamentarians have argued.
The French MEP Mounir Satouri said it was not right that Tunisia should be given “€1bn on a silver plate”. “That cannot happen,” he said, outlining the European parliament’s role as co-legislator in the EU.
The European Commission is working on the fine detail of a deal agreed with Tunisia a month ago when the commission chief, Ursula von der Leyen, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, flew to the country to announce it was ready to provide more than €1bn in aid to support the collapsing economy and deal with the migration crisis.
Controversially, the deal is also expected to provide a framework to allow Italy, and other EU countries that wish, to return people to the country.
At a press conference on the issue in Strasbourg, a series of MEPs lined up to criticise the regime of the Tunisian president, Kais Saied.
“The European Union cannot be part of, complicit in, the breakdown of the Tunisian democracy by President Saied. We need all European institutions united in our call and that the money released needs to be conditioned on full respect of human rights, democracy and of course rule of law,” said Matjaž Nemec, an MEP for the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats.
The European Commission is continuing to work out the detail of the deal, with a memorandum of understanding yet to be agreed.
It said it had previously condemned the dismissal of judges and that the country’s record on human rights was very much part of the current talks with Tunisia.
But the German MEP Michael Gahler, who serves on the European parliament’s foreign affairs committees and is a standing rapporteur on Tunisian matters, criticised the commission for not being more forthright in the past year about Tunisia.
“It is high time for us to become more active than we have seen [on] the commission or executive side,” he said.
Their criticism comes amid reports of at least 500 people from sub-Saharan Africa being transferred back to Tunisia after being pushed into a dangerous no man’s land on the Libyan border and trapped for a week there without access to basic necessities.
Aid agencies said the group was driven out earlier this month amid a rise in anti-migrant and racism-fuelled tensions linked to a killing in the Tunisian port city of Sfax, a hub for traffickers organising risky and sometimes deadly boat journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy.
At the same time, the European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, told MEPs that migration from eastern Libya had gone up 600% this year.
