Migration crisis: Europe throws Egypt’s Sisi a new lifeline
The EU is injecting billions of dollars into Egypt’s hobbled economy in exchange for help fending off irregular African immigration through North Africa. This is the latest display of a hard-hitting policy to outsource Europe’s southern border control to authoritarian leaders.
The deal, signed by the EU and Egypt on 17 March, covers several issues including supporting the Egyptian economy and natural gas investments to replace Russian gas. But, the most controversial aspect has been enlisting the Cairo government, which has long been accused of rights abuses, in clamping down on migrants fleeing wars and poverty from reaching European shores.
European countries are grappling with rising anti-immigrant sentiment at home and increasing arrivals via Egypt and Libya from war-torn Sudan and other African countries suffering economic deprivation and political instability.
Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister of Belgium Alexander De Croo and Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as well as the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, signed the agreement with visibly elated Egyptian President Abdelfattah Al-Sisi. The windfall of €7.4bn, or $8.1bn, came at the right time for Sisi whose government was only a few months ago facing the dire possibility of defaulting on its mounting foreign debt, the largest in the country’s history. Previously, the EU had cut Sisi another cheque of €110m (about $120m) to improve Egypt’s naval and coast guard forces including providing Cairo with advanced search and rescue boats.
The modalities of this funding package, through direct loans to the government, is contrary to the EU’s usual practice of going through EU-funded and controlled projects
Andrea Cellino
Head of North Africa, Middle East Institute
Bad model
The deal is the third with an African or a Mediterranean country after similar agreements with Tunisia and Mauritania. The Europeans view North Africa as the main gateway for asylum seekers. Italy and Greece are the first arrival points in the Mediterranean route given their proximity.
This recent spate of agreements is modelled on the 2016 migration agreement between the EU and Turkey, which helped curb immigration flow into Europe, particularly through Greece, during the height of the Syrian civil war but came with mixed results and a huge price to immigrants.
On top of the security aspect, the broader EU policy behind the flurry of those deals is to improve economic conditions in the impoverished African nations enough to dissuade citizens from coming to Europe. Meloni of Italy has argued before that the strategy aims to tackle the root causes, so migrants do not feel compelled to leave their homelands.
In July, directly before the Egypt deal, Tunisia signed its EU immigration pact. After the cash started rolling, migrants were forced into the Libyan desert where they are exposed to harsh elements making their already perilous journey even crueller. Tunisian authorities also launched a massive campaign to vilify African immigrants.
Rights groups say many migrants face abuse by traffickers in North Africa. Worse, hundreds drown each year at sea trying to reach Europe in fragile small boats that often capsize. Direct migration to Europe from Egypt, a country with 110m people, has not yet turned into a major concern. But the numbers were ominous. In 2021, the figures were nearly 9,000 illegal Egyptian immigrants but, as the country’s economic crisis deepened and inflation soared, the numbers more than doubled in 2022 to nearly 22,000. That dropped somewhat to 13,639 last year, according to data from The Displacement Tracking Matrix of the UN International Organisation for Migration.
Egyptian refugee advocacy groups say illegal Egyptian immigration got attention when, on 14 June, the Hellenic Coast Guard of Greece was implicated in the capsizing of a boat off the Greek coast carrying around 750 migrants. Only 104 survived and 82 dead were recovered. According to testimonies given to immigration groups from the families of the deceased, there were approximately 250 Egyptian passengers on board including children, of who only 43 survived. Athens later accused nine Egyptians of being responsible for the disaster.
Rights hell
As with Tunisia, the package given to Egypt received scathing reviews from rights and transparency advocates who say the money will only bolster the country’s military regime. Such generous deals, they say, reward rights abusers and further embolden them to mete out to Europe-bound African immigrants the cruel measures they have been using for some time against their own citizens.
‘What the countries that partner with or fund the Egyptian regime to achieve economic stability or establish control over migration and borders fail to acknowledge is that Egyptian policies are the main driver of Egyptians’ quest to escape the political and economic hell created by the current regime’, says the Refugees Platform in Egypt, a civil society group advocating for immigrants’ rights, in a statement.
‘This hell involves a clampdown on freedom of speech and expression, targeting civil society components through security measures, and serious violations that have targeted activists, politicians and journalists. These violations have become a pattern and policy of action by security agencies in Egypt.’
The group points to how previous European funding for border control led to security-only approach at the policy and practice levels by the Cairo government.
‘These methodologies relied on criminalization, tightening sanctions, border militarization, and suppressing civil society working in the field of migration. They also targeted local border communities, leading to an escalation of human rights violations at the borders and within cities under the framework of “combating irregular migration,” without any opportunity for accountability and prosecution for crimes committed by state employees. This includes “enforced disappearance, torture, detention in extremely poor detention facilities, and continuous violations of fair trial conditions,” without legal protection or avenues for justice for victims and survivors in cases of irregular migration and human trafficking’, the group says.
Andrea Cellino, Head of North Africa at Middle East Institute Switzerland (MEIS) told Global Insight that the EU policy of outsourcing border policing has indeed empowered authoritarian regimes across the Mediterranean, officially providing economic aid in exchange for migration control. That policy, he says, disregards ‘the nature of the regimes of the partner countries, as well as their capacity to respond effectively and within the limits of human rights and international law’.
‘The 17 March agreement mentions human rights only twice and only in general terms to refer to Egypt’s “commitments to further promote democracy, fundamental freedoms, and human rights, gender equality and equal opportunities”’, Cellino says. ‘Even when more information will eventually be available about the actual implementation of this last agreement, I would not expect a strong conditionality or strict monitoring about either the use of money or the respect for human rights and the rule of law.’
Refugees Platform in Egypt says it verified abuses particularly against new Sudanese arrivals including detaining them ‘in inhumane conditions, subjected them to unfair trials, and forcibly returned them to Sudan in violation of Egypt’s international obligations, well-established human rights principles and agreements’.
Corruption
The deal, whose details are shrouded in secrecy still, scores poorly on another count, critics say. It is not clear exactly how Egypt, where corruption is rampant and which remains among the world’s lowest-scoring countries in the Rule of Law Index, will spend the cash.
‘The modalities of this funding package, through direct loans to the government, is contrary to the EU usual practice, which normally goes through EU-funded and controlled projects’, Cellino says. ‘This makes accountability of this last package very difficult, as the Egyptian government will be the sole authority determining how to spend the money – at least until the EU provides more details about how it intends Egypt to use the money earmarked for migration.’
Karolina Schiffter, Website Officer on the IBA’s Immigration and Nationality Law Committee, says illegal immigration to the EU was a complex issue that required a multipronged approached without which the situation will remain unmanageable. ‘Recent experiences showed that our asylum system is not working well’, she says. ‘The EU should open a discussion on how to make it fair and efficient. The EU must also address the root cause of illegal immigration such as poverty and conflicts in countries of origin and provide support to countries of origin, as well as promote legal pathways for migration. All these activities would require also international cooperation. Without a comprehensive approach combining all these measures, illegal immigration will only grow.’
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