UN rights chief says EU migrant policy is callous, xenophobic

The European Union should take a "more sophisticated, more courageous and less callous approach" to migrants who often die trying to reach the EU in boats that are not seaworthy, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said on Monday.

"Europe is turning its back on some of the most vulnerable migrants in the world and risks turning the Mediterranean into a vast cemetery," he said in a statement, a day after as many as 900 were feared killed in a shipwreck off Libya. Zeid described EU policy as "short-sighted, short-term political reactions pandering to the xenophobic populist movements that have poisoned public opinion on this issue".

The EU should open up legal channels to enable the migrants to enter, while acknowledging that the EU needed the migrants' low-skilled labour, that refugees had a right to seek asylum, and that families are entitled to live together, he said.

The lack of such regular channels had created the problem of people-smuggling, which he said was a symptom, not a cause, of "this wretched situation". "Let us be clear that today's movements across the Mediterranean are rarely entirely 'voluntary', in the true sense of the term," Zeid said.

"They are the result of a continuing failure of governance accompanied by a monumental failure of compassion." The EU should replace its limited "Operation Triton" border control policy with a robust European-wide search and rescue capability, he said, adding that he regretted the closure of Italy's "valiant" broader search and rescue programme, "Mare Nostrum"."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, as this recent tragedy shows," he said.  

Also Read: Hundreds drown off Libya, EU leaders forced to reconsider migrant crisis