A Christian charity worker in Malta could face jail time after he claimed that his faith enabled him to turn away from a homosexual lifestyle he no longer wanted.

Matthew Grech, 33, faces potential fines and imprisonment for allegedly falling afoul of his country’s ban on “conversion practices” when he explained to a local media outlet last year how he left homosexuality behind because he came to believe it was wrong.

“I was invited by this new emerging platform in Malta called PMnews to share my story and to discuss sexuality in general,” Grech told Fox News Digital, noting that he was “surprised” when police later called him early on a Sunday morning and ultimately served him with a prosecution order summoning him to court on Feb. 3.

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Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/christian-charity-worker-faces-potential-jail-time-fine-speaking-leaving-lgbt-lifestyle

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Valletta (AFP) – Interior ministers from four EU countries meet Monday in Malta to try to work out an automatic system to determine which countries will welcome migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean.

The ministers from France, Germany, Italy, and Malta hope to end the long, drawn-out negotiations that have seen vulnerable asylum seekers including babies stranded at sea, sometimes for weeks.

They take place ahead of a European summit in October in Luxembourg.

The mooted automatic distribution system would only be a temporary solution until the current system, the “Dublin regulation”, can be revised.

Its critics have long argued that it places an unfair burden on the Mediterranean frontier countries Italy, Malta, Greece, and Spain.

Italy’s new, pro-EU government has moved quickly to turn the page on the hardline anti-migrant policies pursued by former far-right interior minister Matteo Salvini, who closed the ports to those rescued.

A successful European migrant agreement would be a blow to Salvini, showing that cooperation gets better results than confrontation.

After a meeting last week, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and French President Emmanuel Macron both called for a reform of Europe’s “ineffective” policy.

Countries that did not volunteer to take migrants should face financial penalties, they argued.

– Rotation? –

In a sign of how things have changed over the last few weeks, Italy late Sunday authorized charity rescue vessel the Ocean Viking to disembark its 182 people rescued at sea in Messina, Sicily.

The Italian decision “puts an end to five days of unnecessary suffering,” said charities SOS Mediterranee and Doctors without Borders (MSF) which operate the ship.

“It is unacceptable that the people who have survived this very dangerous crossing… are stranded at sea for days and sometimes weeks before finding a Place of Safety,” the ship’s search and rescue coordinator Nicola Stalla said.

“It is urgent that a European agreement is found to put an end to these repeated stand-offs,” he said in a statement.

At an informal meeting of foreign and interior ministers in Paris in June, 15 countries agreed to the creation of a “European Solidarity Mechanism”.

Croatia, Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, Luxembourg, and Portugal said they would “actively” take part.

But Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, rejected redistribution quotas in comments made during a visit to Rome on Saturday.

Monday’s meeting in Malta will try to decide where those rescued can be relocated — and whether that covers just those fleeing war and persecution, or economic migrants too.

France and Germany are reportedly willing to receive 25 percent of people plucked from vessels in the Mediterranean.

But they are not keen on Italy’s idea for migrants to be sent to countries across southern Europe on a rotation basis.

Italy could take 10 percent of new arrivals — a lower proportion because it has already hosted tens of thousands of new arrivals.

The number of migrants arriving in Europe via the Mediterranean has dropped sharply in recent years. The UN’s refugee body recorded nearly 115,000 arrivals in 2018, down from 170,000 in 2017 and over one million in 2015.

Malta’s Interior Minister Michael Farrugia on Sunday bemoaned the lack of European solidarity when it comes to migrants, despite having “supported one another when faced with harsh economic realities.

“If this doesn’t change, then I don’t see the migration issue being solved,” he told the Times of Malta. “Unfortunately, I see it becoming a divisive issue between member states in the years to come.”

European migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos will also attend the Malta talks, as will Finland’s interior minister — as they hold the EU presidency.

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/eu-ministers-malta-thrash-migrant-system-030217177.html

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Spain has rejected a plan put forward by Germany and France aimed at establishing a mechanism to take in irregular migrants who arrive in the European Union. Madrid voiced its objection to the idea on Thursday given that it would be limited to migrants who arrive in Italy or Malta, and would not include Spain. This is despite the fact that since last year, the latter country has had to cope with the highest number of arrivals.

“Spain has no objection to temporary agreements, providing that they apply to the entire Mediterranean,” said Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska on Thursday during an informal meeting with his EU counterparts in Bucharest, according to sources familiar with the talks.

The EU has spent months trying to find a temporary solution to avoid episodes such as those recently seen in the Mediterranean, with NGO rescue ships stranded at sea with no European port willing to take them in. None of the initiatives mooted have so far prospered, but Spain had not before imposed an outright veto on a plan such as this last one.

There is a sense of weariness among Spanish lawmakers over the attitude of Italy, which has essentially closed its borders to irregular migrants, as well as the feeling that solidarity with Spain in terms of it coping with the influx of arrivals is limited among fellow EU member states.

The French-German plan was aimed at unblocking the EU migratory and asylum policy, which has been at a standstill since the 2015 refugee crisis. Successive proposals – from obligatory quotas to sharing out asylum seekers between countries, or the creation of closed camps for irregular arrivals – have all foundered.

The latest plan from Berlin and Paris involved a temporary solution, based on a mechanism for sharing out the migrants arriving from Libya. The participation in such a mechanism would be voluntary, and a handful of countries – the Netherlands, Portugal and Romania among others – as well as those who would benefit – Italy and Malta – appear willing to back the proposal.

But for Spain the plan is insufficient given that it excludes the area of the Mediterranean which is currently seeing the most arrivals. The route that leads to the south of Spain constitutes the biggest entry point for clandestine immigration to Europe, with an all-time record of 64,000 arrivals last year, according to data from the Interior Ministry.

Madrid also considers it unfair that the plan is designed to alleviate the migratory pressure on Italy and Malta, two countries that are refusing to comply with their international obligations. Marlaska reminded his colleagues on Thursday that on several occasions when Italy and Malta closed their ports to migrants, Spain agreed to take them in.

“Spain rescues [migrants] because it is obliged to do so,” the minister stated, as a clear reproach to those unwilling to do their part.

Despite the rejection by Spain, Brussels opted to back the plan launched by Paris and Berlin. During the meeting in Bucharest yesterday, the European commissioner for migration welcomed the fact that “Germany and France have taken a step toward making this temporary mechanism a reality as soon as possible.” In a post on Twitter, which included a photo of himself and the Spanish interior minister, he wrote that he had assured Grande-Marlaska that “Spain can continue to count on European support to tackle migration challenges and strengthen our cooperation with Morocco.”

DimitrisAvramopoulos@Avramopoulos

Meeting with the Spanish Minister of Interior Fernando Grande-Marlaska. I assured that Spain can continue to count on the European support to tackle #migrationEU challenges and strenghen our cooperation with #Morocco

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Source: https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/02/08/inenglish/1549615277_369957.html

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The post Spain rejects French-German plan to tackle Mediterranean migration crisis first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

This June 12, 2018 photo released Wednesday, June 13, 2018 by French NGO “SOS Mediterranee” shows migrants being transferred from the Aquarius ship to Italian Coast Guard boats, in the Mediterranean Sea. Italy dispatched two ships Tuesday to help take 629 migrants stuck off its shores on the days-long voyage to Spain in what is forecast to be bad weather, after the new populist government refused them safe port in a dramatic bid to force Europe to share the burden of unrelenting arrivals. (Kenny Karpov/SOS Mediterranee via AP)

Forget Brexit or a looming trans-Atlantic trade war. The diplomatic spat this week between Italy, Malta and France over who should take responsibility for more than 600 people rescued at sea shows that the biggest challenge Europe faces today is migration.

It’s not about the hundreds of thousands of people who arrived across the Mediterranean in recent years — many in perilous sea crossings like those aboard the rescue ship Aquarius — seeking better or safer lives. Turkey has welcomed more. Tiny Lebanon and struggling Jordan handle almost two million refugees between them.

The crisis threatening the very existence of the European Union is the enemy within: the inability of the 28 states that make up the world’s biggest trading bloc to manage those migrant arrivals collectively.

Asylum reform is stranded on the rocks of national interests. The questions of who should take responsibility for those arriving — and whether there should be a quota system for European countries to share refugees — are fiercely disputed.

Long-suffering EU nations like Italy and Greece, where most sea migrants enter, feel abandoned by other EU nations.

In response, some European countries have deployed troops, erected border fences or temporarily reintroduced ID checks, undermining Europe’s wide-ranging passport-free travel area. Others have welcomed the migrants in.

Those acting alone have mostly angered their neighbors by passing the problem on. Mutual trust between nations in the bloc has evaporated.

Anti-migrant parties have exploited the chaos, winning votes as they foment fear of foreigners.

“As long as we keep refusing the idea that we have a collective problem that can only be tackled with collective solutions — as long as we don’t see that — we will not find a solution,” European Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans warned. “We will fail collectively.”

EU nations are now flirting with that collective failure, struggling to reform the bloc’s asylum rules known as the Dublin Regulation. It’s a pillar of Europe’s passport-free travel area. Failure to fix Dublin could sound the death knell for check-free travel and easy cross-border business across Europe — the two crowning achievements of the bloc.

For two years, EU governments have battled without success to fix Dublin’s biggest contradiction: that migrants must seek protection in the first European country they arrive in. With most migrants entering the Europe via Turkey or Libya, that chiefly means Mediterranean countries like Greece and Italy.

That rule was part of this week’s dispute over the Aquarius, a rescue ship carrying 629 people including pregnant women and children who were saved off the Libyan coast.

Italy, which controls Mediterranean rescue operations, halted the in-bound ship, claiming that the small EU island of Malta was closer and should take responsibility.

French President Emmanuel Macron waded in, accusing Italy of cynical, irresponsible behavior. The new populist government in Rome found this hard to swallow, given that French border police have been routinely blocking thousands of migrants who try to leave Italy, upholding the EU’s flawed asylum rules.

Spain’s new center-left government came to the rescue, offering the boat safe harbor in Valencia.

“This is not something that Malta, Italy, Greece or Spain should be left alone to deal with. Countries not in the Mediterranean cannot try to use geography to exonerate themselves from responsibility,” Roberta Metsola, a leading EU lawmaker on migration, told The Associated Press.

So sensitive is the topic that the EU’s Bulgarian presidency has spent months supervising closed-door lower-level talks to find a compromise — but the problem is eminently political, not technical.

Hungary and Poland have refused to take in refugees, and other nations barely contributed in the EU’s earlier failed attempt to share the refugee burden.

The problem has put strong domestic political pressure on German Chancellor Angela Merkel — who in 2015 refused to close Germany’s door to migrants, many fleeing conflict in Syria and Iraq. Interior Minister Horst Seehofer now wants to turn away refugees registered elsewhere.

Austria and Denmark, meanwhile, are championing the idea of setting up migrant camps outside western Europe, in the neighboring Balkans. Elizabeth Collett, the director of Migration Policy Institute Europe, says such plans are a sign of desperate times.

“These ideas … look good on paper, but it has been hard to identify a non-EU country willing to be a ‘vassal state’ in this way, or design a system that would actually function,” she said. “What has changed now is the amount of political desperation involved in pursuing these ideas. Countries are willing to put more on the table — that is, pay third countries more — and are less concerned about how well they function.”

EU leaders had ordered a solution to be found by this month. With none in sight, Merkel and her colleagues are forced to grasp the migration nettle again at their June 28-29 summit. A new populist government from Italy in their midst — one whose interior minister has vowed to deport tens of thousands of migrants as soon as he can — will make any compromise on migration even more difficult.

“Europe can be the example to everyone on this issue but we have to see real political will to move away from fiery rhetoric to taking tough decisions,” Metsola said. “The ball is in the (leaders’) court now. The world is watching.”

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/disputed-policies-migrants-top-threat-eu-unity-55940273

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