The tragedies of immigration have no end. In AustriaBetween 20 and 50 refugees were found dead in an abandoned lorry along the eastern A4 motorway between Burgenland Neusiedl and Parndorf. They would have been asphyxiated in the dumpster. The Austrian investigators explained that there is a suspicion that the refugees had already been dead for a day and a half or two. They would have died before crossing the border between Hungary and Austria. The police are chasing the driver of the vehicle, of whom there is no clue. The license plate of the vehicle is Hungarian, registered to a Romanian citizen.
Yesterday, moreover, 51 people were found dead on a direct boat from Libya to Italy. Not only that: hundreds of victims are feared in two other shipwrecks of migrants in the Mediterranean, this time off the western Libyan coast. According to a reconstruction by the BBC, two boats sank: one, which launched a request for help in the past few hours, had about 50 people on board while "the second, which sank much later, was carrying 400 passengers".
Also yesterday, in Vienna, European leaders met for a summit on the Western Balkans. The German chancellor Angela Merkel announced that it has "reached an agreement with Italy and Greece on the fact that the so-called registration centers or Hot Spots must be set up by the end of the year", but Rome and Athens "will be able to accept such centres, only if other countries they are ready to accept their quota of asylum seekers”.
For its part, the EU Commission in a statement he called for “joint actions and solidarity among all: there is an urgent need for all member states to support the proposals put forward by the Commission, even those who have been reluctant up to now. We are faced not with an Italian, Greek, Franco-German Hungarian crisis, but a European one”.
“We have a moral and legal obligation to protect refugees” and we need a “European approach” to managing the current crisis, said the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Federica Mogherini, revealing that new proposals are being worked on, with the elaboration of "a common list of safe countries of origin and a relocation mechanism".
According to the Italian premier Matteo Renzi, that of the migrants in the truck was "an absurd death, which upsets the conscience of each of us and which underlines, once more if there were still need to be, the centrality and urgency of the theme of immigration in a Europe where walls are erected again”.
