European and African leaders agreed at their summit in Abidjan on Thursday 30 November on the need to do more to combat migrant smugglers and traffickers, pictures having appeared over the last few days of migrant slave markets. They also promised to assist the repatriation of migrants trapped in Libya, with the president of the African Union calling for emergency aid to evacuate 3,800 people from Tripoli.
African representatives also sent out a very clear message to Europe: they will have no truck with any bribery on visa policy in exchange for taking back their citizens found to be unlawfully in the EU. “We cannot accept that we be told: take back your children otherwise we’ll take away your visas”, said Alpha Condé, President of the Republic of Guinea and of the African Union, adding that “we agreed to find acceptable solutions”.
With regard to migrants in Libya, European Council President Donald Tusk called for UN sanctions against traffickers. The EU is also committed to backing operations to repatriate migrants from Libya to their countries of origin.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced similar initiatives the previous day, promising that migrants would be evacuated as a matter of urgency and indicating that he had encouraged the EU member states to look at what France is doing in “selecting” in Africa refugees whom it would then transfer directly to France.
Tusk again called for legal migratory channels to the EU to be facilitated.
Some 3,800 African migrants in Libya must be repatriated as a matter of urgency, announced the president of the Commission of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat, during the day, underlining that the overall figure of migrants in Libya was “between 400,000 and 700,000”. The 3,800 migrants, mainly from West Africa, were found living “in inhuman conditions” in a camp near Tripoli, said Moussa Faki Mahamat at the closing press conference. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)