Wealthy countries should agree on a comprehensive plan to take 1 million refugees from Syria over the next five years to end the unfolding series of boat disasters in the Mediterranean, the UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has urged.

In a Guardian interview, François Crépeau said Europe was creating a market for people smugglers by failing to act on Syria. He said his plan could be extended to seven years or widened to include other nationalities, including Eritreans who have been fleeing war.

Migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean have claimed more than 1,750 lives this year – 30 times more than in the same period in 2014.

“We know a great number of Syrians in particular are going to leave these countries and if we don’t provide any official mechanism for them to do so, they will resort to smugglers. The inaction of Europe is actually what creates the market for smugglers,” said Crépeau, a law professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

“We could collectively offer to resettle 1 million Syrians over the next five years. For a country like the UK, this would probably be around 14,000 Syrians a year for five years. For Canada, it would mean less than 9,000 a year for five years – a drop in the bucket. For Australia, it would probably be less than 5,000 per year for five years.



“We can manage that.”



François Crépeau, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights of migrants, said Europe was creating a market for people smugglers by failing to act on Syria. Photograph: SNTV

Crépeau’s comments came as Italy pressed the EU to devise concrete, robust steps to stop the tide of migrants on smugglers’ boats, including setting up refugee camps in countries bordering Libya.

Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, said Italy had saved 200,000 migrant lives at sea since the start of 2014 but that his country’s “noble, generous reaction alone isn’t enough”.

“We are asking Europe to be Europe, not just when it’s time to devise a budget,” Renzi said, to help combat “21st-century slave drivers” of migrants.

The defence minister, Roberta Pinotti, also said human traffickers must be targeted with military intervention. “We know where the smugglers keep their boats, where they gather,” Pinotti told Sky TG24 TV. “The plans for military intervention are there.”

On Monday night, one of the leading smugglers at the main departure point for Mediterranean migrant crossings in Libya scoffed at plans to launch a military campaign. “What are they going to do, put two frigates here? Two warships? In Libyan waters? That’s an invasion,” the smuggler told the Guardian.

On Thursday, EU leaders will hold an emergency summit in Brussels in the wake of a shipwreck off Libya last weekend that authorities believe may have killed more than 800 migrants. If confirmed, it would be the highest known loss of migrants’ lives in a single incident in the Mediterranean.

In the latest arrival of migrants, an Italian naval vessel docked in the Sicilian port of Augusta with 446 people on board who had been rescued from a smugglers’ boat on Tuesday off Italy’s southern coast. The navy said 59 of the migrants are children.



Britain has given £700m in humanitarian aid to Syria but agreed to settle only 143 Syrian refugees. That has been criticised by Nigel Farage, the leader of the rightwing Ukip party, who is otherwise hardline on immigration. The US has a similar record.



Crépeau said the west had to acknowledge the refugees were “stuck in a place where there’s no future for themselves or their children” and had to change policy.

“This is going to be a long-term commitment and we should go at it together. It’s a much better system for everyone – you reduce the number of deaths, you reduce the smuggling business model, and you reduce the cost of asylum claims.”

The plan could allow Syrian refugees to apply from places such as Istanbul, Amman and Beirut to come to Europe, North America and Australia “for a meaningful chance to resettle, instead of paying thousands of euros to only die with their children in the Mediterranean”.

Crépeau also defended “economic migrants”, many who try to come to Europe and developed countries from sub-Saharan Africa. They were “people who may not be in need of protection but are desperate for a future because there’s no job for them anywhere near their country”.



Instead of resisting mobility, countries had to organise it, Crépeau said. That meant taking action on poor working conditions and tackling the underground labour market.

Migrants trying to reach Greece are rescued off the island of Rhodes on 20 April. Photograph: Eurokinissi/Reuters

“They come to Europe because they know there are jobs there. Countries in Europe say, ‘We don’t have any job for our own citizens, we can’t welcome all these people’, but that’s not true. There are jobs. There are very poorly paid jobs in agriculture, in construction, in hospitality or in the care of the elderly or care of young people.

“We refuse to acknowledge our underground labour market because we like the price of tomatoes in June; we like our cleaning lady to be that cheap. These people know there are jobs. This is a huge pull factor.”

Crépeau suggested a seasonal entry visa that would allow low-skilled migrants to enter the country for a certain number of months for a number of consecutive years. If the migrant didn’t find work in the first four months, they would return home and try again the next year.

“If you create mechanisms that incentivise people, you would not have underground immigration to such an extent that you have,” Crépeau said.

“Let’s not be afraid of mobility. Mobility is exactly what we need.”

He pointed to the example of the UK between the first enlargement of the European Union in 2005 and the credit crunch of 2008. In that time, the country welcomed 1.5 million central Europeans and at least two-thirds of them left after 2009.

“This is exactly the flexibility of the labour market that we’re looking for,” he said.

“If we develop, regulate, organise mobility, we will have, in the long run, much better results. But for that we need political leadership to happen. We need people who are able to say to that Sun journalist [the controversial columnist Katie Hopkins who compared migrants to cockroaches], ‘You’re wrong and you should know that.’”

Associated Press contributed to this report



