What’s behind Italy’s reduced landings and EU funds to Tunisia: The Guardian’s exposé

Brussels – Compared to 2023, migrant landings on Italian shores have more than halved. Thanks to the agreements that the European Commission – at the urging of Italy, first and foremost – has signed with Egypt, Mauritania, but especially Tunisia. At a heavy price, however, unveiled again by an investigation by The Guardian: over the past 18 months, EU-funded Tunisian security forces have been systematically committing crimes against migrant people.

According to testimonies collected by the British newspaper in Sfax, a port city from which most barges sail to Europe, hundreds of sub-Saharan migrant women have been raped by Tunisian security forces. “Nine out of ten of the African migrant women arrested around Sfax have been sexually assaulted or tortured,” said the director of an organization providing medical care in Sfax. The National Guard, as already widely documented by various media and NGOs in recent months, continues to “rob, beat, and abandon” migrant women and children in the desert without food or water. Real pushbacks, illegal rejections under international law.

Yet, a substantial part of the 105 million promised by Ursula von der Leyen to authoritarian president Kais Saied to prevent sub-Saharan migrants from setting sail for Europe –of which 42 million have already been disbursed — is dedicated precisely to the National Guard. As accounted for in a December 2023 internal document, Brussels funded the refitting of ships, vehicles, and other equipment for the Tunisian Coast Guard. It also supplied new boats, thermal imaging cameras, and other operational assistance. In the desert on the border with Libya, the EU provided for the “construction and equipping of a command and control center for the Tunisian National Guard.”

The pillar dedicated to migration of the EU-Tunisia strategic partnership (which will cost the EU over a billion in total) aims to “combat human trafficking while respecting the rights” of migrants. Repeatedly pressed on this last point, the European Commission always assured that monitoring mechanisms are in place. It is possible to block the funds in case of breaches of EU human rights standards. But The Guardian’s investigation tells a far different story.

Traffickers in Sfax spoke of a “widespread and systematic” corruption between them and the National Guard. The pattern is simple: “The National Guard organizes the boats in the Mediterranean. They watch them enter the water, then they take the boat and the engine and sell them back to us,” one young boatman explained. And on human rights monitoring, senior sources in Brussels reportedly admitted to The Guardian that the EU is “aware of allegations of abuses” involving Tunisian security forces but is “turning a blind eye” in pursuit of the new imperative to outsource Europe’s southern border to Africa. According to the investigation, although reports of Tunisian violence against migrants are on the table at the European Commission, there are plans “to send more money to Tunisia than is publicly admitted.”

With patrol boats provided by the EU, the Tunisian Maritime National Guard has prevented over 50 thousand people from crossing the Mediterranean this year. On the route to Italian shores, in the first eight months of the year, Frontex recorded 41 thousand entries, 64 percent less than the previous year. However, the number of migrants crammed into El Amra, a town north of Sfax, continues to grow. There are now over 100,000 people, surrounded by police forces, living in conditions described as “horrible.”

Humanitarian organizations cannot enter the huge El Amra refugee camp, even UNHCR, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The UN agency registered 12,000 refugees or asylum seekers in Tunisia. However, officials admit that this is a tiny fraction of the number of migrants living in El Amra. If the Tunisian authorities do not even allow the UN to enter El Amra, it seems implausible that Brussels would be able to monitor the treatment of asylum seekers.

The same doubt emerged for Emily O’Reilly, the European Union Ombudsman, who will conclude the independent investigation on the EU-Tunisia Memorandum next month. The investigation began with two serious flaws in the agreement entered into by von der Leyen and Saied: The European Commission did not conduct any human rights impact assessment on Tunisia before the pact was announced and was careful not to go through the European Parliament’s oversight.