10 Years After EU's 'Never Again' Tragedy, Little's Changed

BRUSSELS (AP) A decade ago this year, the head of the European Unions executive branch stood, visibly shaken, before rows of coffins holding the corpses of migrants drowned off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Some of them, small and bone-white, contained the bodies of infants and children.

That image of hundreds of coffins will never get out of my mind. It is something I think one cannot forget. Coffins of babies, coffins with the mother and the child that was born just at that moment, Jose Manuel Barroso, then president of the European Commission, said in 2013.

More than 300 people died on Oct. 3, 2013 after a fire broke out on a fishing boat that had set off from Libya on the world's deadliest migration route. The boat, which carried almost 500 people looking for better lives in Europe, capsized only hundreds of meters (yards) from shore.

The kind of tragedy we have witnessed here so close to the coast should never happen again, Barroso said. The EU must boost our surveillance system to track boats, so that we can launch a rescue operation and bring people back to safe grounds before they perish," he added.