Europe should come up with a common asylum and migration policy that is humane and realistic, Martin Schulz warned EU leaders on Thursday, the same day as an extraordinary EU summit to deal with the situation.

Schulz spoke before the summit, roughly a week after hundreds of people died trying to cross the Mediterranean.

“Our immediate priority must be to save lives at sea.”

Schulz said there was no such thing an EU migration policy and that instead we had a patchwork of 28 different national systems: “The lack of a truly European asylum and migration policy is now turning the Mediterranean into a graveyard.”

The EP president said search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean should be stepped up quickly, while common European action should take place in a spirit of solidarity with a fair sharing of responsibilities. Schulz said it was not fair to let countries that border the Mediterranean deal with migration on their own.

In addition Schulz pleaded for the same procedural guarantees throughout the EU to ensure refugees are treated fairly and equally, more possibilities to enter the EU legally, as well as closer cooperation with the countries of origin and transit. “We must fight the causes of migration, not the migrants,” he stressed.

From a Greek perspective, PM Alexis Tsipras said on Thursday that Greece wants an effective and “humane” solution, where the responsibility — the economic burden and temporarily hosting the migrants — is shared by all EU member-states.

Greece and Italy have emerged as the main targets of migrant smugglers piloting various types of craft loaded with would-be immigrants towards EU territory, often with disastrous results.

Meanwhile, a later AFP dispatch from Brussels quoted German Chancellor Angela Merkel as saying that the EU will triple funding for its search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

“We want to act quickly and that means we are tripling the funds available to Triton,” she said.