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Guinea, rescinded in 2021, and amid British government plans, so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".
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