Italy has extended air and sea border checks with fellow EU member Spain for another 15 days amid a dispute over migration, the Interior Ministry in Rome said on Monday.<\/p>\n
The measure was introduced a month ago by the right-wing government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni following the arrival of thousands of migrants in Ceuta, Spain’s North African exclave.<\/p>\n
The ministry said the circumstances that had prompted the introduction of border controls on August 1 remained in place.<\/p>\n
Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi informed his Spanish counterpart Fernando Grande-Marlaska of the extension during a “constructive telephone conversation,” the ministry said.<\/p>\n
Italy’s return to border checks, reminiscent of the period before Europe’s passport-free Schengen system, prompted Spain to respond a week later by introducing its own checks on travellers arriving from Italy at ports and airports.<\/p>\n
The Spanish measures are currently due to remain in force until September 7. It is not yet clear whether Madrid will also extend them.<\/p>\n
Rome argued when introducing the controls that Italy’s borders needed to be protected because of the large number of migrants arriving in Ceuta.<\/p>\n
However, there were no indications that any of the migrants who arrived in Ceuta had attempted to travel to Italy. They were not even permitted to travel to mainland Spain.<\/p>\n
Critics accused Meloni of using the border controls to make a political statement at home, as her government faces growing pressure from the new far-right National Future party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Italy has extended air and sea border checks with fellow EU member Spain for another 15 days amid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4446,26658,29490,8113,17,1152],"class_list":["post-78320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-giorgia-meloni","tag-interior","tag-italys","tag-meloni","tag-spain","tag-spanish"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}