Ministers from Germany and France tasked with regulating migration are traveling on Sunday for talks with the president and their counterpart in Tunisia, a major North African stepping stone for migrants trying to reach Europe.
The two-day trip by the German and French interior ministers, Nancy Faeser and Gérald Darmanin, follows what is feared to be the deadliest migrant shipwreck in years in the Mediterranean — the capsizing last week of a fishing vessel packed with men, women and children trying to reach Italy from Libya, Tunisia's neighbour.
More than 500 migrants are presumed to have drowned in the sinking Wednesday off the southern coast of Greece that renewed criticism of Europe’s years-long failure to prevent migration tragedies.
The U.N. migration agency said it could be the second-deadliest migrant shipwreck recorded — after the April 2015 capsising of another vessel on the Libya-Italy route that killed an estimated 1,100 people.
A statement from the German minister's office about her trip with Darmanin said: “We want to create legal migration routes in order to remove the basis for the inhumane business of smugglers. We want the human rights of refugees to be protected and the terrible deaths on the Mediterranean to stop."
