On Thursday 27 July, the European Commission said it was ready to talk to "all the member states to improve the situation in the central Mediterranean", after seeing the proposals made the same morning by France's President Emmanuel Macron in which France, with or without the EU, would create hotspots in safe African countries – especially in Libya – similar to those in Greece and Italy, as reported by French news agency AFP.
According to Macron, who spoke in particular about hotspot-like work in safe African countries, this would "avoid people taking crazy risks when they are not all eligible for asylum". "We're going to go and pick the people up ourselves. I intend to do this from this summer", he added. Through the hotspots system, asylum candidates for Europe would be able to make pre-applications from where they currently are and the people who are able to claim protection in Europe could be identified and sifted from those who are not.
"I want to send teams from Ofpra (the French office for the protection of refugees and stateless people). Some will go to the Italian hotspots and others to African soil, in safe countries where we can deal with these asylum requests", Macron said, also mentioning the possibility of creating hotspots in Niger, according to AFP. Such centres already exist in Niger and are managed by the IOM in particular, and supported by the EU. They aim to encourage migrants wanting to go to Libya to try and cross to the EU to go back to their country of origin voluntarily and take advantage of other alternative programmes.
The Commission said on Thursday that "for the moment, work is being done with the OIM and HCR" in the camps in Libya. It also said that it already has a framework for resettling refugees in the EU (from camps in third countries) and this works well, as Natasha Bertaud, the spokesperson for European Commissioner for Migration Dimitris Avramopoulos stated. On 4 July, the Commission also proposed new offers for resettlement from Libya, with the Commission offering €10,000 per person resettled in the EU from Libya. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)