Legal News

The United Nations (UN) has said the UK must take more migrants from Africa and the Middle East, as thousands of refugees stream across the Syria-Turkey border and cross the Mediterranean Sea to Italy.

David Cameron has already said that the UK will not accept any more migrants, but has sent HMS Bulwark to the Mediterranean to help with search and rescue missions.

However, dispersing migrants across EU member states is an issue affecting all members as migrants leave Italy and make their way to other EU countries.

Numbers of migrants gathering at Calais has peaked in recent weeks as more wait to cross to the UK in the backs of lorries.

The French authorities have tried clearing the camps around Calais, only for more migrants to arrive.

The Daily Mail reports that police in Italy have moved on around 200 migrants who were staging a sit in near the town of Ventimiglia on the French-Italian border, after France refused to allow them entry to the country.

Around 50 migrants are reported to be sheltering on rocks with just foil blankets for cover, having reached the Italian coastline near Ventimiglia, near Nice and the South of France.

The migrants have been photographed on the beach, with hand-made signs pleading for asylum. Many speak French as a result of France’s colonial past.

The UN secretary-general’s special representative on international migration, Peter Sutherland, has now said that there is a higher degree of “negativity” towards immigrants in the UK than in other EU member states – and the UK is not housing “its fair share” of migrants fleeing war zones in Africa and the Middle East.

Mr Sutherland added that a “positive case” for accepting more migrants had never been “properly explained”.

However, former Conservative development minister Andrew Mitchell said that the UK had been “a leader” is trying to resolve the migrant crisis.

”Britain has been a leader of the international relief effort for these enormous migration crises,” he said.

“Britain has contributed more humanitarian support than practically the whole of the EU.

“We are putting our shoulder to the wheel.

“Were the government to start welcoming migration from Syria and some of these very difficult places in Africa, public support for Britain’s development policy would start to evaporate.”

Italy has announced that it is to ask the EU to create refugee processing camps in Libya to help with the crisis.

Currently the Italian Navy and HMS Bulwark are collecting migrants in boats off the coast of Libya and ferrying them to Italy for processing, from where they can make their way to other EU member states.

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