Externalising migrants inhuman and damaging says Blanchett

(ANSA) - ROME, NOV 8 - Externalising the migrant issue like Italy is planning to do with Albanian processing centres for able-bodied males and non-pregnant women who are picked up by Italian navy ships is inhuman and damaging, UNHCR refugee body goodwill ambassador and Hollywood actress Cate Blanchett told the European Parliament Wednesday.
    The Italy-Australia deal comes 10 years after Blanchett's native Australia signed an offshore processing agreement with Papua New Guinea, rescinded in 2021, and amid British government plans, so far stymied by the courts, to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
    The Australian Oscar winner told the EP that migrant management externalisation practices were "ineffective and inhuman policies" which "have wasted billion of taxpayer dollars" and which are now "a discredited and largely abandoned approach".
    She added: "I ask myself if those who are now calling into question the Convention on asylum rights have ever met a refugee or have been forced to face up to the human cost of damaging policies like externalisation". (ANSA).