September 24, 2015 — Responding to Wednesday’s EU Summit, Sanjayan Srikanthan, Director of Policy and Practice at the International Rescue Committee UK, said:
“The EU’s decision to share responsibility for relocating 120,000 refugees from Greece and Italy is an important first step to move away from a divided approach, which has seen at its worst fences and tear gas used to obstruct the human impulse to seek safety.
The EU’s investment of a billion Euros will help make life more bearable for the 4 million refugees in the Middle East. Over the past months hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Syria have headed straight to Europe because they didn’t see a life worth living in the towns, cities and camps of neighbouring countries.
It is vital that the EU provides more legal routes to Europe because until the war in Syria ends we are only going to see more risking their lives. More than 100 refugees have died crossing the seas since Aylan Kurdi’s tragic death at the beginning of September. The seas are not only getting rougher but also colder and we will undoubtedly sea even more deaths until safer alternatives are available.
The UK continues to lead in supporting Syrian refugees in the Middle East and it’s additional commitment will have a great impact on the lives of refugees across the region. However, until the war ends refugees are going to keep coming to seek safety in Europe. The UK should and can do far more to take its share of the responsibility to support those refugees that have already arrived. It is unfitting for a country with the credentials and capabilities of the UK to be the only EU member state not taking refugees under the relocation scheme. The offer to resettle 4,000 refugees a year, the same number that can arrive on the Greek island of Lesbos in a single day, just isn’t enough to help Europe deal with the scale of the crisis it faces.”