By Ingrid Melander

LUXEMBOURG, June 12 (Reuters) - EU interior ministers face tough talks on Tuesday over who should be responsible for saving illegal migrants at sea, days after wrangling over 27 migrants who spent 3 days clinging on fish nets in the Mediterranean.

European Union officials say Malta will face resistance when it asks ministers meeting in Luxembourg to agree that illegal migrants intercepted outside of EU waters by EU boats be shared among the bloc's 27 states and sent there.

"I do not see how we can share up illegal migrants, it would give a bad signal, say you can come, we will save you, we will distribute you among ourselves," a spokesman for the EU Commissioner for migration Franco Frattini said on Monday.

Malta was accused by Frattini of failing to meet international obligations after 27 shipwrecked Africans spent three days clinging to tuna nets in the Mediterranean at the end of May while Malta and Libya argued over who should rescue them.

The small Mediterranean island -- an EU member since 2004 -- hit back by saying it cannot cope alone and that the EU as a whole should take action if it wants to save people in Libyan waters, outside of Malta's own search and rescue area.

"I hope we will avoid trading insults," one diplomat said of Tuesday's meeting. "The legal situation is very complex."

Both Malta and the European Commission want EU-wide guidelines over who is responsible for saving people at sea and on whose land they should be disembarked.

Another diplomat pointed out that EU states had so far always refused sharing numbers of refugees and migrants.

The interior ministers are due to rubber-stamp on Tuesday a deal to set up a pool of on-call border guards for emergency operations.

But the bloc's border agency Frontex played down expectations, saying the pool of nearly 500 border guards would only be sent on emergency operations and would not stay permanently, neither around Malta nor Spain's Canary Islands.

"Frontex is not and will never be the panacea to problems of illegal migration," Frontex's director Ilkaa Laitinen said in a letter, adding that its mission was not to conduct search and rescue operations but to protect borders.

Frattini last week urged EU states to help Malta and Spain by sending boats and helicopters for joint patrols, saying little of the nearly 50 helicopters and planes and more than 100 boats promised to Frontex were actually made available.

"We have a complete failure of common high standards and solidarity," British lawmaker Sarah Ludford said in a debate on Monday in Brussels over the bloc's migration and asylum policy.

Rights groups accused the EU of putting people at risk by strengthening its border controls.

"Indiscriminate and inhumane border controls force desperate people to take even greater risks to flee extreme poverty, persecution and war," the Jesuit Refugee Service said in a statement on Monday.

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