Ministerial visit

Karner shows his Tunisian counterpart the Danube

Kamel Fekih and Gerhard Karner: Migration talks on the Danube(Bild: BMI(C)MAKOWECZ)

Interior Minister Gerhard Karner held a working meeting with the Tunisian Interior Minister Kamel Fekih in Krems an der Donau today and showed his counterpart the beautiful Wachau region. The topic was migration. Tunisia is one of the largest transit countries for migrants from North Africa to Europe.

The conversation focused on migration, combating people smuggling, border protection and security. Fekih's visit to Vienna is in response to the joint working visit by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner and Danish Migration Minister Kaare Dybvad Bek to Tunis at the end of 2023.

The ministers will take a boat trip.(Bild: BMI(C)MAKOWECZ)

"Tunisia has made great efforts to strengthen border protection. The training center set up by Austria and others in the border town of Nefta plays a central role in this," said Karner. 

The ministers of Austria, Tunisia and Denmark together in the Tunisian desert(Bild: Petja Mladenova)

The training center for border guards in Nefta on the border with Algeria was jointly opened in November 2023. So far, 26 courses with 214 participants and 15 training courses with 152 people have taken place there. The center is to be further expanded in a second step, which was also the subject of the talks. Tunisia is itself affected by illegal migration as a transit country. Close cooperation is therefore planned in the operational area to combat smuggling. Investigators and police officers will hold talks on this in Vienna in April.

Karner attributes the current decline in asylum numbers to consistent measures taken by the Ministry of the Interior in the fight against asylum abuse and smuggling. For example, the number of asylum applications from Tunisian citizens fell from 13,000 in 2022 to 437 in the previous year. This year, there have been 60 asylum applications from Tunisians so far.