Hundreds of thousands of refugees and immigrants will try to travel from Northern Africa to Europe in the immediate future. According to Spiegel the European Union is planning to keep them away by building refugee camps in Libya
The German publication claims that it has a 17 page internal EU document which was recently distributed among the member countries; Describing an agreement with the EU, similar to the recent one with Turkey on the closing of the Eastern Balkan route.
In the document, the head of EU foreign policy, Federica Mogherini, stresses that the EU will propose that Libya creates temporary holding centres as well as concentration structures. In fact this idea had already been presented to the former dictator Muammar Cadaffi so that refugees would not be traveling towards Italy.
Estimates on the possible number of incoming refugees this summer are between 200.000 to half a million. In the last meeting over the refugee crisis, in Valetta, the Italian Prime Minister Mateo Renzi had noted that the EU will have to follow the example of the agreement with Turkey; the registration and the processing of the asylum requests should be carried out in hotspots in Africa.
As Spiegel concludes, the manner and the terms of the possible agreement between Lybia and the EU are still unclear.