Shahira Bibi is the one I can never forget, her little body wrapped in black fabric on a concrete bench in a morgue in Aceh, Indonesia. She was three years old, but weighed no more than a six-month-old infant. After her family was abandoned at sea with no food or water, Shahira Bibi fell ill with tetanus. She and her mother and older sister had spent months floating across the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, hoping to make it from their home in Rakhine state, Myanmar, to what they thought was the promised land: Malaysia.

More than 170,000 people are estimated to have attempted this journey since 2012, leaving Myanmar or Bangladesh on fishing trawlers modified to cram hundreds of men, women, and children like Shahira Bibi into their holds, above deck, anywhere anyone can fit. My job is to ask refugees about their journeys and write reports about these mixed maritime movements – “mixed” because they include both refugees and migrants – but the passage is so awful I have run out of words to describe it. There is only enough room to squat for weeks on end. No one gets more than one bowl of rice and one cup of water per day. The toilet is a couple wooden planks resting on iron bars welded to the side of the boat – the outside.

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Anyone who protests is beaten, sometimes to death, or simply shot. Refugees and migrants are three times more likely to die on this route than in the Mediterranean Sea, making it by some measures the deadliest sea crossing in the world. We believe 2,000 lives have been lost this way since 2012, not including hundreds, perhaps thousands, more who perished after reaching land and being held hostage in wooden cages built by smugglers in the jungles of Thailand and Malaysia.

My colleagues and I have interviewed over a thousand people who made the crossing, each with their own horrific story, but Shahira Bibi is the one I can never forget. She was on one of the boats that made headlines a year ago when smugglers were prevented by authorities from disembarking their human cargo and so simply cut their losses, abandoning ship and leaving thousands of refugees and migrants adrift with dwindling rations.

Countries in the vicinity found some of the boats and provided food and water before sending them back out to sea. Shahira Bibi’s boat came into contact with at least two different naval patrols before a dispute on board over what little water remained erupted into an all-out melee. At least a dozen people were killed, either in the fighting or because they drowned, until finally Indonesian fishermen came upon the boat and rescued the survivors, including Shahira Bibi, though her body was already in spasm.

“At first I could still hear her crying softly,” said a nurse who treated Shahira Bibi after she was brought to land. Shahira Bibi died three days later, but she didn’t have to. She could have been rescued days earlier, before the tetanus bacterium fully consumed her nervous system. She could have been taken to a safe place on land and received emergency medical treatment. She could have been recognised as a refugee and a victim of trafficking and given a chance to go to school. She could have been alive today.

In the wake of that crisis at sea last May, countries in the region met in Bangkok exactly one year ago and put forward a set of proposals to prevent future tragedies. They agreed that the first priority was to save lives, by enhancing search and rescue efforts for all those in distress, including refugees and migrants. They also agreed that anyone rescued should be disembarked to places of safety and given immediate care, whether that is medical, psychosocial, or, for refugees, protection from persecution. These proposals were echoed in a landmark declaration made in March by ministers of the Bali Process, a 45-country forum on people smuggling and human trafficking.

Some of the proposals, relating to the prevention and prosecution of people smuggling and human trafficking, have been implemented, partly contributing to a sharp decline in the number of people taking to sea from Bangladesh and Myanmar. Although we continue to hear reports of isolated attempts, large-scale movements across the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea have effectively ceased in 2016, and with the current onset of the monsoon season, we do not expect them to resume until the end of this year, if not next year.

The lull in movements is an opportunity to make good on the other proposals relating to search and rescue, safe and predictable disembarkation, and reception processes that ensure vulnerable individuals have access to the services and protection they need. Affected countries could move these proposals forward by establishing a joint task force, also proposed in Bangkok a year ago, that can issue standard operating procedures for the rescue of refugees and migrants in distress at sea.

These could include pre-identified safe places for disembarkation, so that the next time coastal authorities come across refugees and migrants in dire straits, they know exactly where to take them. That is what already happens with a commercial or pleasure vessel in distress; just not with vessels carrying refugees and migrants. And if disembarkations of refugees and migrants repeatedly occurred in the same few countries, less affected countries could contribute funds to support their neighbours. In fact, the infrastructure for this kind of responsibility-sharing model already exists: last July, Asean (Association of South-east Asian Nations) established a trust fund to support precisely these kinds of activities.

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International organisations stand ready to help. My agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has joined the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Organisation for Migration in submitting a plan for implementing the outstanding proposals. We have deep ties with refugee and migrant communities that can help alert us when a boat might be in distress, and we have satellite imagery capability to try and locate such a boat. We also have expert staff who can be rapidly deployed to receive refugees and migrants on shore and identify their specific needs.

But we need to act now. As Europe struggles with scores of people continuing to risk their lives in the Mediterranean, we have a precious window of time in south-east Asia to implement a predictable response system while the waters of the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea remain quiet. These movements, like the waters they cross, ebb and flow. Their return is inevitable, but another unprepared response, and another three-year-old lying in a morgue, need not be. One year ago, we let Shahira Bibi die; let us not let it be in vain.