HELSINKI (Sputnik), Svetlana Alexandrova – The UN Refugee Agency documented 137,000 refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea into Europe in the first six months of 2015, compared to the 75,000 during the same period last year.
Yves Pozzo di Borgo, a senator and member of the French delegation at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly session in Helsinki, points out the link between the conflicts in the Middle East and the unprecedented flow of migrants attempting to reach European shores.
"The US made a huge mistake when it went to Iraq, and France too, when it participated in NATO military action in Libya and killed [former leader Muammar] Gaddafi because now we are facing the result of this stupidity," di Borgo told Sputnik.
On June 30, the UN Refugee Agency doubled its estimate of the number of internally displaced people in Libya to over 400,000 people, with over 2 million Iraqis fleeing wars over the past decade.
Di Borgo stated that economic migrants and refugees must be allowed into the bloc but only after "…organizing the process."
The UN Refugee Agency estimated that 1,867 people fleeing conflict had drowned in the Mediterranean this year.
