EU urged to share refugees as boat tragedies rise

LUXEMBOURG, Oct 08 (AFP): A nucleus of four EU countries was trying Tuesday to coax more reluctant member states to take a share of rescued asylum-seekers, a day after another Mediterranean migrant boat tragedy.

Germany, France, Italy and Malta were seeking support from colleagues in an EU interior ministers' meeting in Luxembourg for an agreement they worked out September 23 in Malta meant to serve as a six-month, stop-gap plan pending a long-delayed reform of the EU's asylum policy.

The meeting came after a boat packed with around 50 migrants capsized Monday off Italy's island of Lampedusa, resulting in the drowning deaths of at least 13 women, some of them pregnant.

The aim of the so-called Malta declaration is to avoid such tragedies in the future, and to find a solution for NGO rescue ships filled with migrants often being refused entry to EU waters for weeks.

"Listen to me, we cannot continue like this, with what is happening in the Mediterranean," the EU commissioner for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said as he arrived for the meeting in Luxembourg.

He added, however: "We cannot try to find only ad hoc solutions, we need a permanent mechanism."

The temporary agreement wants to ease the burden of first-call countries such as Italy and Malta which currently are required to host the migrants arriving by sea while their asylum cases are looked at.

Under the deal, France and Germany have volunteered to host a share of the asylum-seekers.

It also wants to find a way of breaking the business model of people-smugglers who push flimsy, overcrowded boats of migrants from North Africa headed towards Europe.