by Alessandra Cardone
ROME, June 4 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) must help more on migrants, otherwise Italy would have to find other solutions to the issue, the country's new interior minister said on Monday.
"It is a matter of common sense, the arrival and reception of hundreds of thousands of 'non-refugees' cannot be only an Italian problem," Matteo Salvini said.
"Either Europe gives us a hand in securing our borders, saving lives, and granting our safety, or we will have to choose other paths," he added, without elaborating.
Salvini, also the leader of far-right League, was sworn in as interior minister on Friday within Italy's first populist government led by Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, almost three months after inconclusive elections.
The League forged a coalition with anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) on the base of a political platform including a crackdown on irregular migrants.
Salvini wrote his comments on the League's official Facebook account on Monday, after speaking on the same issue with state-run broadcaster RAI 1.
On Sunday, during a short trip to a migrant center in Sicily, a major point of arrival for people rescued during the perilous Mediterranean crossing from African coasts, he had already stressed Italy could no longer be "Europe's refugee camp."
The first occasion to formalize Italy's new stand would come on Tuesday, when the European Council of Home Affairs Ministers will gather in Brussels.
The meeting would focus on migration routes in the Mediterranean, and on debating a reform of the common EU asylum system.
The system is based on so-called Dublin Regulation, which currently states all new migrants and refugees arriving in the EU must register or file asylum request in the country where they land first.
Italy, according to the interior minister, would not support the proposal to revive the Regulation on the table in Brussels.
"We will send a delegation (the cabinet being engaged in securing confidence vote in senate) to say no," Salvini declared.
"Instead of helping, it would further penalize Italy and the other countries in the Mediterranean like Spain, Greece, Cyprus, and Malta."
According to a draft published by the EU Council ahead of the meeting, one element in the new system would be the "targeted allocation (of refugees) primarily on a voluntary basis, with strong incentives."
Another point in the proposal calls for "a stable responsibility for eight years", meaning the countries at the forefront of migrant and refugee inflows might be responsible for the new arrivals for that long.
Previous proposals for a Dublin Regulation change and a fairer refugee distribution across the EU have been strongly advocated by Italy (among others) since 2015, and opposed by several partners such as Austria, Hungary, Poland, and other eastern EU countries.
The EU Council introduced a system of mandatory quotas to reallocate some 160,000 refugees from Italy and Greece in September 2015 -- at the height of Europe's migration crisis.
Some 31,500 people were relocated up to November 2017, with "almost all Member States" respecting the legal obligations, while the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland under infringement procedures for not accepting them, according to the EU Commission.
Up to June 1 this year, Italy has registered 13,430 arrivals, some 9,200 of which from the coasts of Libya, according to Interior Ministry's data. It marked a 71.95 percent and 77.7 percent drop compared to arrivals in the same period of 2016 and 2017, respectively.
The country has started seeing a sharp decrease in inflows after the signing in mid-2017 a controversial deal with Libyan authorities and factions to curb departures from there.
Overall, it has received 181,436 migrants and refugees in 2016, and 119,369 in 2017.
