Malta is calling for a €100 million EU aid package to avert a humanitarian disaster caused by migrants fleeing Libya amid COVID-19 fears.
“Migrant detention camps are overflowing, and according to a number of credible reports thousands of migrants are either escaping from, or being allowed to leave these camps,” according to Evarist Bartolo, the Foreign Minister of Malta. He claimed that “there are all the ingredients for a major humanitarian disaster waiting to happen, as desperate people look to the Mediterranean Sea as their only escape.”
Malta is calling for the EU package to be in the form of food, aid, medical supplies and equipment, stressing that “Alleviating or at least minimizing the difficult circumstances that migrants are living in will be an incentive for them to stay, rather than risk their lives in the Mediterranean Sea at a time of crisis, and with very limited rescue options”.