There are at least two reasons why I accepted this invitation. The first one is that, as I think everybody sees at the time, for this Italian Government the Mediterranean is a priority, and there cannot be a Mediterranean without Italy and Libya together. That’s also the reason why, in these two years, we’ve been improving a lot our cooperation on many sides - I will come back on that to answer your question. 
And the second one is that there are challenges in this time that we cannot face alone. Migration is one of those challenges, for what the Prime Minister was saying, and I want also to greet my good friends, I saw many good friends here – the Prime Minister of Malta, the Prime Minister of Tunisia, Commissioner Schinas – all people that try to work together in these times on the topic of migration. And, to face seriously this topic, I think we need a 360-degree approach. Italy has been working a lot on that, moreover on the multilateral level, and this approach has mainly three or four lines.
The first one is the fight against human trafficking, for what the United Nations tells us is that human trafficking is nowadays one of the most powerful criminal traffic in the world. There are people making lots of money using the desperation of fragile persons, and we cannot allow it, for these organisations are becoming very powerful but they don’t care about those human rights and human beings. It’s something in Italy we see every day happening, in Malta too, and that’s why we want to fight against human traffickers. Also because illegal migration is an enemy of legal [migration].

Look what happened in Italy in the last years: we could not allow many people to enter legally for we had too many illegal migrants. We cannot allow that it is criminal organisations deciding who has the right or not to live in our countries.
And that is the second part of the work we have to do: the path for legal flows of migration. My Government has done a flat decree that lasted for three years widening the quotes and widening the quotes moreover for the countries, also for the countries that help us in fighting illegal migration.

But the most important point is that you cannot solve the problem of migration if you don’t go to the origin of the problem.
I mean, if you don’t pose yourself the problem that we have to respect moreover the right not to be forced to emigrate. And that means that we need, that the most important thing that we have to do is create a new cooperation, moreover between, I think, Europe and Africa. And I’ve been, you know, telling many times that, yes, we cooperate, we do many things together, what I don’t completely agree with sometimes is the approach that we’ve had.
I mean, I don’t think the charity approach is the right one, I mean ‘ok, I will try to save you somehow’.
The predatory approach is certainly the wrong one.
The right way to cooperate is a peer-to-peer cooperation, a strategic cooperation.
I mean bringing investments to solve problems of both.
I will make an example to make it easy: energy. We have got many crises, we are facing many crises, but every crisis hides also an opportunity. Now we have a problem in Europe about energy sources; Africa – North Africa but all Africa - is potentially a huge producer of energy, for itself mainly but also that it could export. Italy is interested for it is the ‘door’. So, concentrating our efforts on a strategy that ties our destiny for the future; it’s not something we’re doing for six months or three months, it’s something on which we want to grow together. So Italy decided to give, let’s say, the good example with its Mattei Plan for Africa. We’ve been choosing some topics – energy, infrastructure, agriculture, water, education, health – beginning with some nations and then widening the best practices, also involving the private sector – so, public and private resources. We put on it many, some billion euros of our cooperation, and I think it has to be matched also with other initiatives, for example at the European level – the Global Gateway -, at the G7 level – the PGII – and we are trying to match them.
Obviously, Libya is one of our priorities. We’ve been working on energy together, we are working on infrastructures together, we are working on training together, we are working on many topics which are very, very strategic for both, also for, yes, we have a so ancient cooperation that also for example in training people in the labour market can make the difference between us, but we’ve been choosing with Prime Minister Dabaiba, and we keep on talking about that – there will be a business forum in the next months that puts together our best companies.

Question: Will you stay [here] until then?
President Meloni: I’ll stay until then, yes, I’m a Libyan citizen at the time, I’m becoming a citizen.

I’m coming back so we’ll make another initiative, but also on the migratory level it is very important. I consider this initiative, for example, we’ve been doing - and I will [close] – the Rome Process, putting together many countries of the wider Mediterranean. The next one will be in Tunisia, I’m happy that the Prime Minister of Tunisia is here, and initiatives like that help us, concentrating in a more concrete way to solve together this problem, while we work at the bilateral level to reinforce the cooperation which is necessary also to do the rest of the work.