(Adnkronos) – Italy’s premier Giorgia Meloni and her Danish and Dutch counterparts Mette Frederiksen and Dick Schoof on Thursday hosted an informal meeting that centred on how to strengthen the legal framework for migrant repatriations, Meloni’s office said in a statement.
Representatives from the European Commission, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Malta, Poland, the Czech Republic, Sweden and Hungary also attended the gathering on the sidelines of a European Council meeting (taking place on Thursday and Friday), according to the statement.
The two-day European Council meeting is centred on geoeconomic challenges, Ukraine and the Middle East, according to its website.
The concept of the “new informal meeting” is to bring together European Union member states that have a special interest in “innovative solutions to the management of migration, particularly in bolstering the legal basis for deporting migrants to their homelands, said the statement.
“In addition to expressing satisfaction for the results achieved so far by the informal group of nations most interested in innovative solutions, I indicated some new lines of work, starting with the follow-up to the open letter of 22 May on the subject of international conventions and their ability to respond to the challenges of irregular migration,” the statement cited Meloni as saying.
Meloni and the other leaders present at Thursday’s meeting thanked Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the entire EU executive for “the operational and concrete work carried out in the field of migration,” the statement continued.
“We agreed to continue to maintain close coordination, also in view of the next European summits,” the statement concluded.
