‘EU should welcome 1 million refugees’

geneva — The UN rights chief on Monday called for the European Union to take bolder steps to address its swelling migrant crisis, insisting the bloc could easily take in one million refugees.

“It is well within the EU’s means to give refuge, over a number of years, to one million refugees displaced by the conflicts in Syria and elsewhere,” said Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.

“This would represent barely 0.2 per cent of the EU’s population,” he told a special debate on migrant rights at the UN Human Rights Council, pointing out that Lebanon has already taken in 26 per cent of its population in refugees. His comments came as surg- ing numbers of migrants and refugees have been risking their lives on rickety boats to reach safety in different parts of the world.

More than 100,000 people have made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, and some 1,800 have drowned trying. “When people are unable to use regular channels to escape oppression, violence and economic despair, they may attempt, in desperation, to find irregular ones,” Zeid said.

Latvian ambassador Raimonds Jansons, speaking on behalf of the EU, insisted the bloc was trying to address the problem.

“The situation that Europe is facing at its southern external borders is unprecedented, not only in terms of the number of migrants and refugees arriving by boat, and the tragic loss of life in the Mediterranean, but also in terms of the response it has triggered” by the European Union, he told the council. —

have already been

killed in boat journeys in 2015