The birth-pangs of a policy

LAST week a Danish surveillance aircraft spotted a rickety fishing boat stuffed with would-be migrants 24 nautical miles off the Libyan coast. It alerted the Italian coast guard in Rome, which in turn dispatched Poseidon, a Swedish multipurpose vessel on patrol in the Mediterranean. Three hours later the ship’s crew ran into 613 men, women and children, from places as far apart as Nigeria and Bangladesh. One by one they clambered aboard, where they were given food, water and a quick health check before awaiting their delivery to shore. Like trophies, pictures of the vessels the Poseidon has intercepted adorn a stairwell below the ship’s mess hall. Since its deployment to Sicily on June 1st as part of an expansion of Operation Triton, the European Union’s border-surveillance mission in Italy, Poseidon has taken part in 14 rescue operations and saved 2,600 souls.

If only Europe’s governments could co-operate as happily. This week marked their latest failed attempt to reach a piddling goal: the relocation of 40,000 asylum-seekers from Italy and Greece, which are groaning under record arrivals, across most of the EU’s other members. Despite Stakhanovite efforts from Luxembourg, which as the holder of the EU’s rotating presidency was charged with securing national contributions to reach the number, the pledges reached just 32,256. Five times as many migrants reached Italy and Greece in the first half of this year alone. Explaining their opposition, sceptical governments speak airily about tackling the “root causes” of migration instead. As these include civil war in Syria, tyranny in Eritrea and a Libyan state that has lapsed into gangsterism, this is code for doing nothing.

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