It is a mark of honour to preside over the European Union, as Malta is doing these six months, but there is also a price to be paid. Nothing comes free in this world.

Right from the beginning of Malta’s presidency, it has been made clear, not just by the EU Member States and the Commission, but also, as it happened, by Malta that one of the first topics to be tackled is the thorny question of migrants and the EU’s efforts to repatriate, send back, those migrants who are not classified as refugees.

As we report today, the Minister of the Interior, Marco Minniti, is due in Malta today for talks with the government.

Italy, as the Financial Times reported yesterday, is to step up measures to repatriate migrants who have no right to stay in the country, in a sign of the pressure facing authorities after an influx of people crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

The country’s chief of police has asked officers nationwide to step up efforts to identify and repatriate migrants who are not entitled to asylum, while Italy will also open new identification centres to hold people before their expulsion.

The tougher migrant stance marks the first significant policy change under Paolo Gentiloni, the new prime minister, who took over after Matteo Renzi stepped down in December following his bruising defeat over a referendum on constitutional reform.

According to the Italian interior ministry, more than 180,000 migrants arrived by sea in 2016, exceeding 2015’s tally of 153,000 and passing the record number of almost 170,000 people in 2014.

The interior ministry planned to open several new “identification and expulsion centres”. Four such centres are already operating but only have capacity for 360 people.

While the aim would be to have one such centre in each Italian region, these could still handle only a small portion of the migrants estimated to live in Italy with no authorisation.

According to Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, in 2015 fewer than 5,000 migrants were repatriated among more than 27,000 expulsion orders handed out in Italy.

As this paper explained two days ago, the efforts at repatriation from Italy are only a part of a wider EU effort to come to an agreement with certain countries in Africa from where most of the migrants come and who are not in a state of war, to take back their nationals and receive EU funds in return.

One such country is Nigeria, the richest country in Africa. According to the Nigerian media, the Nigerian Government has said the EU is willing to fund a social intervention programme for the repatriation of illegal Nigerian migrants from EU countries.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how an average of 83 Nigerians crossed illegally from Nigeria to Europe, daily, via the Mediterranean in the first nine months of 2016, according to data by the European Union.

The daily figure was extrapolated from the 22,500 illegal Nigerian migrants that the EU said crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe between January and September this year.

This figure in the first 9 months of 2016 is against the 23,000 who crossed in the whole of 2015.

Now as this paper reported on Tuesday, a common EU policy on asylum will be established during Malta's EU Presidency, the Minister for Home Affairs and National Security Carmelo Abela, announced.

He also said that an important element of the agreement will be the return of migrants who do not qualify for asylum. There was also a need to have agreements and arrangement with Third World Countries to better address immigration.

Now originally, the intention was to share out the migrants among the Member States. That was what Germany tried to persuade the other Member States to do. But a good number of Member States flatly refused to take in any migrants.

So the EU is having to fall back on the repatriation strategy which Malta, as EU President, is committed to push forward. However, as we said on Monday and as has been pointed out by others, there are ethical issues involved. Convenience, let alone agreement around the Council table, is no substitute for treating a migrant as anything less than a human being with dignity and rights.

Malta must not let the glory of being EU president make it forget the duty of upholding human rights always and everywhere.