France and Italy have intensified their bitter row over migration after a charity-operated ship carrying hundreds of asylum seekers rescued in the central Mediterranean docked in the French port of Toulon after almost three weeks during which Italy’s far-right government failed to give it safe port, reports The Guardian.
The French government called Italy “irresponsible” and “inhumane” for not coming to the aid of the ship, which had been stuck in Italian waters for weeks carrying sick passengers who had been rescued at sea between Libya and Italy.
“Trust has been broken,” the French junior minister for European affairs, Laurence Boone, told Franceinfo radio. She said Italy had made a “unilateral decision” that “put lives in danger” and did not comply with international law or European rules.
The standoff marks a deepening rift in Paris’s relations with Italy’s new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Brothers of Italy, a party with neofascist roots.
Meloni hit back at France, telling a news conference she was “struck by the aggressive reaction from the French government, which from my point of view is incomprehensible and unjustified”.