Italy’s Meloni seeks broad cooperation to stanch flows of migrants to Europe with aid to Africa

ROME (AP) — Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni has called for new, more equal relationships between Europe and migrants’ countries of origin and transit. She convened a meeting of some 20 nations, EU officials and international organizations aimed at stanching flows of illegal migration. Human rights groups see the one-day summit as creating a future roadmap, and worry it will amount to anti-migrant policies that put the onus on Africa to keep Africans seeking better lives, or fleeing repression, out of Europe. It comes against the backdrop of hundreds of migrants blocked in the desert as they are pushed back from Tunisia into Libya.