CRI听力:Rescue and Help Underway for Migrant Shipwreck

The charity group 'Save the Children' says its working to try to offer help to the survivors of a migrant shipwreck off the coast of Libya this past weekend.

145 people are being taken care of in Italy after their ship, with close to 550-people onboard, went down while trying to make the treacherous journey.

As many as 400 others are feared dead.

It's believed around 500 migrants have died already this year trying to make the journey from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Humanitarian organisations are calling on the European Union to bolster its rescue operations in the Mediterranean.

Laurens Jolles is with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"The present capacity to rescue in the Mediterranean is insufficient and that there is really a need very soon, very swiftly and very urgently to do something about that. That secondly there needs to be a legal alternatives to have to be able to come to Europe. And thirdly, I think it's totally irresponsible, what I hear around, all these comments of nationalists and sometimes populist movements to try to stop any attempt to improve reception capacities in country's arrival."

Italy scaled back its maritime rescue missions last year following heavy pressure from anti-immigrant parties.

An estimated 35-hundred people died trying to cross the Mediterranean last year.