Brussels: David Sassoli said that migration had been addressed at Council summit in Brussels but it is thought that EU leaders allocated only 20 minutes to the issue.
At a news briefing on the summit, Sassoli said, “Parliament actually raised the need for a debate on the issue at the Council meeting. Our appeal was not sidestepped and, yes, it was addressed and I hope it will be on the agenda of the next Council.”
The latest tragedy happened just last month when merchant vessels and a charity ship searching the Mediterranean for boats carrying migrants found 10 bodies floating near a capsized rubber boat believed to have had 130 people on board.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), more than 2,200 people perished at sea trying to reach Europe last year, more than a third on the increasingly busy route to Spain’s Canary Islands.
In all, 2,276 migrants are known to have drowned while 86,448 arrived by sea in Europe in 2020, IOM said in a report. A further 52,037 migrants were intercepted at sea.
The EU has struggled with the issue since 2015, when over 1 million people, most of them Syrian, Iraqi or Afghan refugees, arrived on its shores, the majority through Greece.
“Migration is a demographic, economic and human reality which Europe needs given its ageing population and the labour shortages in several key sectors” Sylvie Guillaume, S&D
A new pact to tackle the issue was put forward by the European Commission last September but a final deal has yet to be reached. Arrivals have dropped significantly to about 95,000 people last year, most to Italy, Spain and Greece. The Parliament Magazine
