Migration experts condemn 'perversion' of EU naval mission

(BRUSSELS) - More than 300 leading migration experts denounced Thursday the European Union's plans for a military operation to fight people smugglers in the Mediterranean.

EU ministers approved the proposals this week although plans to destroy boats belonging to human traffickers in Libyan waters still need UN approval.

"Where is the moral justification for some of the world's richest nations employing their naval and technological might in a manner that leads to the death of men, women and children from some of the world's poorest and most war torn regions?" the experts and academics said.

"A dangerous perversion of history is being peddled to answer this question," they said in a jointly signed article on the prominent OpenDemocracy website.

They said the EU's comparison of the situation in the Mediterranean with a "21st century slave trade" was misleading.

"As scholarship on the history of slavery makes painfully clear, what is happening in the Mediterranean today does not even remotely resemble the transatlantic slave trade," they said.

Experts from leading global universities including Oxford, Harvard and Princeton signed the article.

The EU has said the mission is aimed at tackling traffickers behind a trade which has itself led to more than 1,800 people drowning this year while crossing from North Africa in flimsy boats.

The migrants are fleeing war, mainly in Syria,repression and poverty.