The EU allocates 210 million to turn Mauritania into a barrier for irregular emigration to the Canary Islands

The Commissioner for the Interior of the European Union (EU), Ylva Johansson, and the Minister of the Interior of Mauritania, Mohamed Ahmed Ould Mohamed Lemine, signed this Thursday in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, a cooperation agreement on migration matters that aims to convert to this African country in the new great brake on irregular emigration that reaches the Canary Islands.

With financing of 210 million euros, announced a month ago by Ursula von der Leyen, one of the pillars of this pact is the reinforcement of cooperation to prevent irregular migration, as well as intensify the return of Mauritanians from European soil.

Among other measures, greater cooperation is planned from the European Border Agency (Frontex), especially in the transfer of equipment and training of State security forces.

The Spanish Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, was also present at the signing of the agreement.

“The irregular route to the Canary Islands has had more deaths than we can count.

Fighting against illegal human trafficking means saving lives,” Johansson assured journalists after the formal event, held at the Nouakchott Palace of Congresses.

In the last three months, Mauritania has become the main departure point for canoes to the Canary Islands, but its waters are also a mandatory passage point for boats leaving from Senegal, which is experiencing a political crisis and a wave of protests, sporadic but repressed with great violence, since 2021. In this sense, Grande-Marlaska emphasized the experience of cooperation in immigration control that Spain and Mauritania have accumulated since 2006, with a stable presence of agents from the Civil Guard and the National Police in the port city of Nouadhibou, but stressed that "the fight against irregular migration is not only bilateral, it is a responsibility of the EU, of its 27 member states."

It is not just the crisis in Senegal.

Mauritania, with five million inhabitants, is located in the conflictive Sahel region, hit by the advance of jihadism, food insecurity and climate change.

However, it is the only country in the region that has managed to remain stable: it has not suffered any attack or attack for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are waging a veritable war against terrorism that has caused some five million refugees and internally displaced people and tens of thousands of deaths since 2012. The military junta that seized power in these three countries has signed military and cooperation agreements with Russia to the detriment of France and, by extension, the European Union.

This agreement shows that Mauritania is the exception and that it has decided to strengthen its cooperation with Europe.

In addition to intensifying the fight against irregular emigration "to stop traffickers and smugglers", the EU-Mauritania agreement also contemplates strengthening legal migration, specifically, encouraging students, researchers and businessmen to travel to Europe, improving the policy of visas, which includes studying the possibility that Mauritanian citizens do not even need them for short-term trips or reducing the times for obtaining them in certain cases, as well as encouraging circular migration for work reasons.

As a result of the aforementioned instability in the Sahel and particularly in its neighbor Mali, where the Army and its allies from the Russian mercenary company Wagner carry out an offensive against jihadist groups and Tuareg rebels, the flow of refugees arriving in Mauritania has intensified in recent months.

At least 70,000 people have crossed the border from Mali since last October, according to sources from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), bringing the number of asylum seekers on Mauritanian soil to more than 150,000.

For this reason, the EU has included as one of the pillars of this migration agreement the strengthening of capacities in terms of registration and care of refugees as well as facilitating their access to basic social services.

This notable presence of refugees, especially in the border area with Mali, is causing an increase in tension with the local population, with whom they compete for access to resources.

Furthermore, the Mauritanian authorities are aware that among the refugees entering the country there may be members of armed groups and that this can generate instability.

The EU, aware of this pressure, has committed to allocating part of the funds to this problem, which affects both refugees and the populations that host them.

One of the counterparts that Europe has wanted to emphasize in this pact is the training of young Mauritanians to combat unemployment, for which it plans to invest both in Vocational Training and in entrepreneurs' access to microcredits and loans.

Mauritania and the EU committed this Thursday to launch a more concrete action plan with all these initiatives, as well as to hold at least one annual high-level meeting and different technical meetings for their correct development.

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