The Ivorian government has rejected assertions from international organisations that its citizens constitute a significant portion of recent undocumented immigrants in Italy.
The European coastguard and border guard agency Frontex has reported that the majority of migrants who have arrived in Italy this year originate from Ivory Coast, Egypt, and Guinea.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has stated that Ivorians are the second most common nationality among sub-Saharan nationals who have arrived in Italy since January.
Ivorian Interior Minister Vagondo Diomande has dismissed those comments as false, according to a statement seen by AFP on Tuesday.
“These serious accusations made against our country are based solely on the declarations of illegal immigrants recorded by the Italian immigration services,” said the minister.
“No verification has been carried out with the assistance of the relevant services in Ivory Coast to ascertain the reality of the Ivorian nationality of these migrants,” he added, denying “allegations based on mere presumptions”.
According to the interior minister, several identification missions conducted between 2009 and 2018 in several European countries had shown that less than 15 percent of migrants presumed to be Ivorian actually possessed Ivorian nationality.
Irregular arrivals of migrants in Italy via the Mediterranean from North Africa totaled almost 114,300 between January and August, nearly double the number in the same period in 2022, according to Frontex.
Tunisia and Libya serve as the departure points for thousands of migrants crossing the central Mediterranean to reach Italy.
Last week, the Ivorian government announced the initiation of procedures for the introduction of a visa requirement for travelers from Tunisia.
