Experts set to help EU with Tunisia migrants

Three Swiss experts are primed to help the European Union and Italy deal with a wave of illegal migrants coming from Tunisia after last month’s revolution.

The EU’s border agency, Frontex, started its work at Italy’s southern border on Sunday. It requested help from Switzerland last week.

“We told Frontex that Switzerland would have two documentation specialists and one expert for air surveillance,” Walter Pavel, a Federal Customs Office spokesman, told the Swiss News Agency on Sunday, confirming newspaper reports.

The Swiss team is ready, but Frontex still has to officially call up the three experts, Pavel said. It would be the first time Switzerland has been involved with a Frontex mission.

At least 5,500 people from Tunisia are said to have arrived in Italy since the overthrow of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January, with many travelling to the Italian island of Lampedusa, off the North African coast.

Last week the justice minister, Simonetta Sommaruga, said that preparations were being made in Switzerland to deal with more refugees, in particular to find extra shelters.

However, Karin Keller-Sutter, head of the Conference of Cantonal Directors of Justice and Police, does not agree that the refugees should be distributed among the cantons. She told a newspaper on Saturday that most seemed to be economic refugees.

For his part, Eduard Gnesa, Special Ambassador for International Cooperation on Migration Issues, told the Sonntag newspaper that Europe had “justifiable fears” concerning a wave of refugees from north African countries. If Europe took in tens of thousands of Tunisians, this would encouage Egyptians, he said.