Debate: Deaths at sea: a common EU response to save lives and action to ensure safe and legal pathways
Date: WEDNESDAY, 15 MARCH 2023
Speaker: Ylva Johansson
Language: EN

Since this Parliament put this debate on the agenda, yet another tragedy at sea: 30 people missing, presumed drowned.  Behind the numbers, there are people, human beings, like Shahida Raza. She was 27 years old, from Pakistan. She was such a woman. All she wanted was to care for her disabled son, Hasan. She could not come legally, she thought. She’s one of their more than 80 people, as far as we know, who died in the waters off Calabria on 26 February. The price of her life: EUR 8 000 – the smugglers fee, blood money.  The shipwreck apparently happened when the smugglers steered the vessel onto shallow ground. The smugglers abandoned ship, leaving their passengers to their fate.  This tragedy must be a call to action. Our first priority: save lives. Our alternative: safe and legal pathways. Our mission: fight the smugglers who ruthlessly endanger people’s lives.  We must work relentlessly to bring them to justice, be always one step ahead. Fighting smuggling is central to our action plan on the Central Mediterranean. We must step up the fight as team Europe with Member States.  We are building partnerships to fight smuggling, supporting joint investigations between Member States and North African partners. I will soon travel to Tunisia – where, as you know, the situation is of concern – to boost our joint fight against smugglers and strengthen our comprehensive migration partnership.  And we must do more to prevent irregular departures, stop people getting into smugglers boats and risking their lives at sea.  But we need migration but in a regular way: safe ways, legal pathways. We must work as team Europe with countries of origin, transit and destination to manage migration jointly with our partners along the routes, including the Central Mediterranean. To save lives, we also need to work better together. Coordination is at the heart of the new European integrated border management strategy that the Commission adopted yesterday, based on your valuable input from this House. And we relaunched the European Contact Group on Search and Rescue. I welcome the active participation of Member States who are now working to improve situational awareness and cooperation at sea.  But we need also to give people alternatives to smugglers, boats and trucks. Legal migration for those who want to work. Our societies and economies need skilled labour. Healthcare alone lacks 2 million professionals today. So we are setting up an ambitious new talent pool to help people enter into the EU safely and legally. And we are working on the talent partnership so people can learn and work in key sectors in Member States. And we will provide legal pathways for refugees, safe journeys to safe homes, resettlement and humanitarian corridors for 50 000 people in the next two years, supported by at least half a billion euro. We are linking community sponsorship of refugees to work by supporting companies with a targeted funding call to employ refugees now living in camps and in limbo. We have already successfully adopted the new blue card and I encourage the co-legislators to make progress and adopt the two legislative proposals on the Single Permit Directive and the Long-Term Residence Directive.  In the letter from President von der Leyen to the leaders, she outlined the key operational actions on migration we are taking already now. She will update the Council on progress next week. All of these policies and operations are important but will only be truly effective as part of the European migration policy.  I am encouraged by the JHA Council last week, when ministers from across the EU committed to adopt the whole pact on migration and asylum during this mandate. I am encouraged by the Swedish Presidency committed to start trilogues already in June on the central pieces on solidarity and responsibility, including the special category for the search and rescue cases on relocation. And, of course, by the progress this House is making by adopting the mandates on the key pact files, I hope already this month.  So let these tragedies at sea remind us: migration challenges need a European response to save lives, to manage migration, to fight smugglers, to open safe and legal pathways. I am fully aware that you, in this House, already know this. We need to work together to find solutions and to agree on the pact.