"Europe cannot sit idly by whilst millions [of Syrian refugees] are left struggling on our doorstep," Iverna McGowan, acting director of Amnesty International's European Institutions Office, said.
"The international community's failure to respond to the world's worst displacement crisis since World War II is shameful," McGowan added.
The general report "Left Out in the Cold: Syrian refugees abandoned by the international community" covers data on the 4 million Syrian refugees forced to seek asylum. Currently, 95 percent of them are hosted by Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, as the EU is standing aside, letting refugees embark on dangerous sea routes into Europe.
The JHA Council, a meeting of justice and home affairs ministers from all of the EU member states, gathering to discuss migration into Europe and cross-border issues, will be held December 4 and 5 this year.
Unrest in Syria, which later turned into a civil war, erupted in 2011, with government forces fighting rebels and jihadists, some of which have links to al-Qaeda. Since 2012, the country has been ravaged by advances from the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). According to estimates by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Syrian civil war has taken over 300,000 lives.
