Out-of-step Italy shows scant respect for the EU In making overtures to Iran and Libya, Italy is trampling agreed EU policy underfoot.

Franco Frattini, the foreign minister of Italy, broke ranks with his European Union colleagues last week by announcing that he would travel to Iran for talks with the country’s leadership. Under an informal agreement, the member states have delegated all contacts with the isolated Islamic republic to Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief. No EU politician of Frattini’s rank has travelled to Iran since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005.

The timing of the announcement on 20 May was significant: Ahmadinejad faces a presidential election contest on 12 June in which none of the four candidates - two reformists and two conservatives, including the incumbent – is thought capable of gaining an outright majority in the first round. Disillusionment with Ahmadinejad is running high. Pictures of a smiling president receiving the highest-ranking EU politician to visit Tehran in many years would not have been unwelcome to him.

As things turned out, the visit did not happen. The Iranians insisted that Frattini meet the president not in the capital Tehran, but in Semnan, where Ahmadinejad was attending the test launch of a new missile. But the cancellation did nothing to reassure Frattini’s EU colleagues, whom he had failed to notify of his plans at a meeting in Brussels of EU foreign ministers only two days earlier. Italy’s foreign ministry denied to foreign reporters that such a trip was planned and then briefed Italian journalists about it, which contributed to the awkwardness – and to suspicions that the trip had a commercial purpose. Italy is Iran’s leading EU trade partner. On Thursday (21 May), the chief executive of ENI, an Italian energy company, denied Iranian reports that the two sides were about to sign an oil exploration contract worth €1.15 billion.

Iran is a troubling subject for the EU because years of sanctions have failed to check the regime’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. The US, since the change from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, is seeking to re-engage with Tehran. So Italy’s desire to involve Iran and to be involved in the EU’s Iran policy, which has been run by a steering group of Germany, France and the United Kingdom, is out of step, but not out of touch with the broader international climate.

The pattern is evident in other policy areas as well. The EU has been seeking a rapprochement with Libya – until a few years ago seen as a rogue state – and has been negotiating about an agreement with Tripoli since November. Libya is stand-offish about the EU’s neighbourhood policy and its Union for the Mediterran-ean, but open for closer co-operation on sectoral issues. But, and once again mainly for domestic reasons, Italy has gone beyond established EU policy. Earlier this month, Italy began sending migrants intercepted by Italian coastguard vessels back to Libya. According to the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, the policy risked violating the 1951 refugee convention Libya has not signed up to the convention and a UNHCR spokesperson said on 12 May that there was “no assur-ance that persons in need of international protection may find effective protection in Libya”. Yet, according to UNHCR figures, 75% of those who made it to Italy’s shores claimed asylum and 50% of them had their application granted.

Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, justified the change in policy by comparing Italian collection centres for refugees to concentration camps – though he had earlier said that inmates were “free to go out for a beer anytime”. Berlusconi made the comparison during a joint press conference in Rome on 19 May with José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission. Both Barroso and Italy’s EU partners have remained very subdued in their comments on the change in policy, perhaps because it is superficially modelled on procedures used by Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, which alerts local coastguards in Morocco, Senegal and other countries to the presence of refugee boats in their waters. But Frontex itself does not return asylum-seekers to countries where they might be at risk, as is the case with Libya.

Italy and Malta – at the forefront of combating illegal migration in the Mediterranean – have long argued for burden-sharing with other EU member states and Italy’s actions may well be calculated to send a message to partners. This will be little consolation for those hundreds of migrants who were return-ed, a good number of whom – judging by last year’s figures – will have been genuine refugees. They have now been deprived of their right to lodge an asylum application.

As in the case of Iran, Italy appears to have been motivated at least in part by commercial considerations. Libya has invested billions in Italian firms, including ENI and UniCredit, a bank. Finmeccanica, a defence company, intends to open a plant in Libya and hopes to win a Libyan contract for border technology – which, incidentally, would also help the Libyans stem the flow of illegal migrants.

By tradition, Italy, a founding member of the common market, has been very supportive of the EU. What may trouble its European partners, is that Italy’s unilateralism, laced as it is with a disregard for the EU, appears not to be harming the government. Berlusconi, who has concentrated power in his hands in a way that no Italian politician has managed since 1945, remains Italy’s most popular politician.