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European States Raise Pressure for Syria Peace at U.N. Rights Council

Europe's migrant crisis took center-stage at the U.N. human rights council on Monday, as European states said the need to end the conflict in Syria was at an all-time high.

After formally receiving the latest report from U.N. investigators on widespread rights abuses committed by all sides during the four-year war, European delegations stressed that ending conflict in Syria was the only way to contain the flow of people seeking refuge on the continent.

"We must not forget that the root cause of this migration stems from Assad's treatment of his own people," Britain's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Julian Braithwaite, told the council, referring to Syrian President Bashar Assad. 

The solution in Syria was to help moderate anti-government forces "to agree a future free from the regime," while supporting a U.N.-backed political settlement, Braithwaite said. 

Voicing a sentiment expressed by several other European delegations, a statement from Greece said, "a viable political solution to the conflict is now more needed than ever."

Greece has received a majority of the nearly half million migrants and refugees who have washed up on Europe's shores this year and said it was struggling to care for new arrivals amid its own "economic and social constraints."

The overwhelming majority of those who have arrived in Greece are Syrians. 

The panel of four U.N. investigators -- known as the Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (COI) -- voiced increasing frustration over the failures of the international community to forge a political solution to the conflict.

"The profound human suffering, long seen in the hospitals and camps of Syria’s neighbors, is etched on the haggard faces of refugees huddled in European train stations and camping behind razor wire at (European) borders," COI chairman Paulo Pinheiro told the rights council.  

"This is the spiraling cost of the failure to bring Syria back to peace."

Syria's civil war has killed more than 240,000 people, forced another four million to flee the country and left some 7.6 million displaced internally.

Source: Agence France Presse


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