One other policy upon which European leaders could have embarked from the beginning was to ensure that asylum claims were processed outside Europe. For legal and organisational reasons, it makes no sense to begin the process of working out who is a legitimate asylum seeker and who is not once migrants are inside Europe. This was the policy of the Australian government when they experienced over the last decade a flow of migrant boats setting off for their country mainly from Indonesia. As with the situation in the Mediterranean a number of the boats sank and there were huge outpourings of public sympathy for the migrants. But asylum centres in Australia were full and the processing became a legal nightmare once migrants were in Australia. Although the stretch of water is far wider than the Mediterranean and the numbers were never of a comparable size, the Australian government instituted an emergency policy that swiftly saw a decline in the number of boats setting out. They used Nauru and Manus Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, as holding centres and processed the asylum claimants there. Australian government vessels also increasingly located and turned back vessels heading to Australia illegally.

The situation is not precisely analogous, but Australian officials have said in private since the beginning of the current European crisis that this is the way in which Europe will have to deal with its crisis at some point anyway. With the political will and financial incentive there is no reason why European governments could not institute arrangements with various North African governments to set up facilities on their territory. A process of ‘leasing’ territory in Libya is not impossible at some stage. It would certainly be feasible in Tunisia and Morocco, and the French government could help persuade the Algerians to cooperate in a similar manner. Egypt could also be incentivised as part of its European cooperation packages. Processing claimants in North Africa would not only have a disincentivising effect, as it has had in the Australian case, it would also give the European asylum system a chance to catch its breath.