Eleven days after the boat chartered by SOS Méditerranée docked in Toulon, with 230 migrants on board initially locked in an international “waiting area”, the government remains under fire from criticism from both opposition and defenders of exiles, for his management of this reception deemed unbridled by some, too safe by others.
“We will obviously draw conclusions from what we have experienced for the Ocean Viking”, declared Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin during the session of questions to the government at the National Assembly, questioned by the deputy. LR Fabien di Filippo, who spoke of a “fiasco”.
The law “is not necessarily adapted to this situation”, continued Gérald Darmanin. “We must change the law and that is precisely what we are going to do in the immigration law” proposed by the government, which is carrying out all-out consultations on this draft text which must be the subject of a parliamentary debate on the 6 and December 13 before an official presentation in early January 2023, he added.
The Minister of the Interior also mentioned the establishment “from June” 2023 of a “Schengen entry and exit system, which has never existed before”, without further details.
Questioned by AFP, the Ministry of the Interior did not immediately specify the outlines of this mechanism.
The minister’s entourage, on the other hand, indicated that four people were still on Tuesday morning in the closed waiting area created on the peninsula of Giens, in the south-east and in which the government wanted to keep around 190 migrants, i.e. all survivors of the Ocean Viking with the exception of unaccompanied minors.
– “Political failure” –
These four survivors “will be required to be returned to their country of origin”, we learned from the same source.
“There is a plane that has already left” for Mali, assured Mr. Darmanin before the National Assembly on Tuesday, without further details.
He had mentioned the upcoming expulsion of around 40 of these migrants last week, before a salvo of massive releases by court decisions, which led right-wing and far-right oppositions to judge the situation out of control. .
Most of the migrants have “fainted into the wild”, thus lambasted Fabien di Filippo, while the RN deputy for Loiret Mathilde Paris deplored the “powerlessness” of the state.
The government “respects the rule of law and the law in general”, retorted Gérald Darmanin to justify the release of almost all of these people.
“People are not completely in nature,” also defended government spokesman Olivier Véran in the morning on Cnews.
“It’s not a fiasco (…), first of all it’s what we call the rule of law”, also opposed Olivier Véran.
The minister affirmed that the government is “in the process of contacting” the released migrants so that they “return to the asylum system”.
The government’s strategy, which has created an ad hoc detention site, is a “political failure”, for her part estimated the director of the National Association for Border Assistance for Foreigners (Anafé) Laure Palun, who challenged the “waiting area” in court.
“But it is also a failure for people who have been locked up for some for eleven days,” she added. “It necessarily added violence and suffering” after a long wandering at sea.
