10 years after EU’s ‘never again’ tragedy, little’s changed

Teddy bears and flowers placed are placed on the coffins of deceased migrants inside a hangar at Lampedusa's airport, Italy, October 5, 2013. [AP]

A decade ago this year, the head of the European Union's executive branch stood, visibly shaken, before rows of coffins holding the corpses of migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Some of them, small and bone-white, contained the bodies of infants and children.

"That image of hundreds of coffins will never get out of my mind. It is something I think one cannot forget. Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child that was born just at that moment," Jose Manuel Barroso, then president of the European Commission, said in 2013.

More than 300 people died on October 3, 2013 after a fire broke out on a fishing boat that had set off from Libya on the world's deadliest migration route. The boat, which carried almost 500 people looking for better lives in Europe, capsized only hundreds of meters from shore.

"The kind of tragedy we have...

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