“Faced with this situation, the French authorities have taken a decision specifically to assign (to the ‘Ocean Viking’) the port of Toulonwhere the ship should arrive by Friday morning,” Darmanin said, adding that the rescued migrants will receive medical assistance and will have the opportunity to submit their request for asylum. Only after that, “people without asylum rights in our territory will be subject to return without delay,” he added.

This, explained the minister, a decision taken after “in the last few days and last night, contacts with European partners have doubled to” encourage the Italian government to comply with international law and with its obligations. For this reason, Darmanin added, Italy’s refusal would lead to “very strong consequences on bilateral relations“And in Italy’s relations with the European Union (EU), he has warned.

And therein lies the French retaliation. “The Italian government is losing,” he added, also suggesting that France to tighten border controls and can stop receiving transfer to your country around 3,500 refugees currently in Italy, as governed by the solidarity mechanism for the distribution of refugees between European countries.

limit the situation

So explode new conflict inside The EU, after France canceled its initial readiness two days ago to allow ships to dock, which ultimately strained French internal politics — especially because of the abuse of the French government’s toughest wing, reluctant to show solidarity with migrants rescued at sea — and leaving ‘Ocean Viking’ in limbo for hours on endwho still had no clear indication of his goals as of Thursday morning.

This situation caused rapidly deteriorating situation on the ship from ‘Ocean Viking’, with “people with panic attack you worry“, and others who started this Wednesday began refusing food, according to Elisa Brivio, a spokeswoman for ‘Ocean Viking’. In addition, “four people, three in serious health, and a relative of them, had to be evacuated immediately (to the port of Bastia). in Corsica),” added Brivio, ensuring that the ship came to send 46 port assignment requests10 of them to France.

Even though Italy and Malta are closest safe ports after ‘Ocean Viking’ rescue -and that, therefore, France is not obliged by law to offer its assistance-, the ship decided earlier this week ask Paris, Madrid and Athens to let it dock in one of their ports. The request that finally fell on Francetwo days after the Italian government pressured the Elysee in the name of “sharing responsibility for the migration emergency, to this day behind Italy and several other Mediterranean countries,” Palazzo Chigi wrote on Tuesday. Italian government.

Bad luck for Italy

“It is proven”, said lawyer Fulvio Vassallo Paleologo, “that it has resulted in clashes inside the EUand between France, Germany and Italy, at the responsibility of the flag state.” However, according to the law, “it is not the flag state that should determine the port”, he explained, also stressing that in recent days delays in the bailout caused the death of a woman and a newborn only 20 days old, whose body was found on the boat that reaches the island of Sicily from Lampedusa.

Hence also that the result presupposes, in fact, bad drink for Italy. In fact, on the one hand, the crisis occurred when the arrival of migrants in Italy has increased to almost 90,000 migrants so far this year (last year 57,000). On the other hand, these numbers they don’t put Italy at the top of the list European countries with largest number of asylum seekers, led by Germany (232,000 people), followed by France (82,000), the United Kingdom (83,000) and Spain (91,000), according to data from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM, for its English acronym).