2023-10-07 02:31:59
The German government plans to stop funding migrant rescue charities in the Mediterranean after being targeted by criticism from Italy, the popular daily wrote on Friday Bild.
In the German budget for 2023, two million euros ($2.1 million) had been allocated to sea rescue charities, but there is no mention of anything like this in the draft budget for next year, this newspaper pointed out.
This is “not an oversight”, he added, citing sources at the German parliament’s budget committee and assuring that the Chancellery and the Foreign Ministry are both in favor of the cancellation. of this financing. Neither institution was immediately available to comment on this information.
Critics of Italy
Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni recently wrote a letter to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressing her “astonishment” over Germany’s funding of charities helping irregular migrants in her country.
Italy was faced with massive arrivals of candidates for exile at the end of September, particularly on the small island of Lampedusa.
Questioned about this missive, Berlin confirmed that it was granting between 400,000 and 800,000 euros to each of two projects relating to migrants.
During a press conference last week following talks with her Italian counterpart Antonio Tajani, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock defended her country’s support for these rescue missions. “Volunteer sea rescuers have a mission to save lives in the Mediterranean,” she said.
Source of quarrels
However, at Friday’s EU summit in Granada, southern Spain, Olaf Scholz struck a different tone. Asked about this funding during a press conference, he insisted that it had been approved by Parliament and not by the government. “I did not make this proposal,” he said.
The Granada summit was dominated by a row over planned changes to EU immigration rules. To express their dissatisfaction, in a primarily symbolic approach, Poland and Hungary thus obstructed the adoption of a joint declaration on immigration at the end of this meeting.
The issue of migration, one of the thorniest among the Twenty-Seven, was put on the agenda of this summit at the request of Giorgia Meloni following the recent influx of migrants in Lampedusa, which recalled the urgency of a European response.
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