EU Seeks Rapid Reaction Teams to Deal With Illegal Immigrants

Under the plan, the teams could be called in by an EU member state needing temporary assistance for such things as identifying people, managing risks, medical help and interpretation.

EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Franco Frattini said the experts would be drawn from national border guard services and seconded to a member state in need of more help by the newly created EU border agency.

Frattini said he wanted to see a permanent team of 250-300 specially trained officers, who could be dispatched from their home member states within 10 working days of receiving a request for help.

"We need a reinforced and more efficient fight against illegal immigration, fundamental for the credibility and coherence of our immigration and asylum policies," Frattini said. "By being tough on illegal immigration we prevent immigrants from being exploited and we remove the key pull factor for illegal immigration."

Improving EU coordination

The plan is part of a wider package of proposals aimed at improving coordination between EU members, which also focuses in particular on a code for short-stay visas for third-country nationals.

If the proposals are approved by EU member states and the European Parliament, they would make it much easier to carry out operations similar to a technical assistance mission slowly getting off the ground in the Canary Islands.

The Spanish islands off the northwestern coast of Africa are facing waves of clandestine immigrants with more than 10,000 estimated to have arrived by sea since the beginning of the year.

The EU borders agency is running a mission to help the Canaries with identifying immigrants and repatriating them as well as monitoring the Senegalese and Mauritanian coasts.

Help for Malta

Malta could also soon receive EU help in the form of Italian and Greek patrols for East African immigrants trying to reach the tiny Mediterranean island from Libya.

However, some member states hold reservations towards the mission as long as Libya does not give permission to patrol in its waters, Frattini said.

The difficulty of coordinating the struggle against clandestine immigration has been highlighted recently by the plight of 51 Eritreans who were picked up by a Spanish trawler off Malta but whom Valetta refuses to accept.

After they remained five days adrift on the trawler, Madrid pledged Wednesday to take in some of them but insists that from a legal point of view it should be up to Libya and then Malta to handle them.

The diplomatic standoff signals a tough new policy by Malta, the EU's smallest member state, which claims it already has more than its share of clandestine immigrants -- more than 2,000 -- seeking to reach Europe from Africa.