2023-07-16 18:21:02
On Sunday, Tunisian President Kais Saied signed a “strategic partnership” agreement with the European Union that would help combat people smugglers.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, in addition to Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, witnessed the signing ceremony of the Memorandum of Understanding on the strategic and comprehensive partnership between Tunisia and the European Union, according to a statement by the Tunisian presidency.
“(The partnership) contains agreements on disrupting the business model of people smugglers and traffickers, strengthening border controls, improving registration and return procedures and all essential measures to strengthen efforts to stop irregular migration,” Rutte wrote on Twitter.
The Tunisian presidency did not mention details of the “strategic partnership”, but the spokeswoman for the European Commission, Dana Spinant, had said on Friday that the European Union had offered a “total partnership” with Tunisia in a visit on June 11, accompanied by financial support amounting to more than billion euros.
The agreement aims to prevent the crossing of illegal immigrants from the Tunisian coast to the European coast, to combat smugglers and to facilitate the return of migrants to Tunisia from the European Union.
However, this partnership has been severely criticized by non-governmental organizations, due to the Tunisian authorities’ treatment of immigrants from sub-Saharan African countries.
Following clashes that claimed the life of a Tunisian citizen in early July, hundreds of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were expelled from the governorate of Sfax (central east), the main departure point in Tunisia for migrants, and the authorities transferred them to border areas, according to non-governmental organizations.
The governorate of Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, is the starting point for a large number of illegal crossings of migrants towards the Italian coast.
Some Tunisian coasts are less than 150 kilometers from the Italian island of Lampedusa.
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