ANKARA
EU leaders should take a “more sophisticated, more courageous and less callous approach” to dealing with the current migrant crisis, a statement by the United Nations said.
The statement came on Monday, a day after a boat carrying more than 700 migrants capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. Officials believe most of the people on board have drowned.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein said in the statement that he is not surprised by the latest tragedy.
“These deaths and the hundreds of others that preceded them in recent months were sadly predictable,” Al-Hussein said.
Al-Hussein also called on European governments to take action and reinstate the Mare Nostrum program, emphasizing that the current search and rescue program is totally inadequate and is geared more toward “border control and policing the seas than to saving lives.”
“Stopping the rescue of migrants in distress has not led to less migration, nor indeed to less smuggling, but merely to more deaths at sea,” Al Hussein said. “Triton should immediately be replaced by a European-wide, state-led and well-resourced search and rescue capability in the Mediterranean.”
According to the UN Refugee Agency, more than 35,000 migrants have arrived to southern Europe by boat so far in 2015.
More than 1,600 others have drowned in the Mediterranean this year.
