Europe's migration system is broken, British Interior Minister Theresa May wrote on Sunday, blaming its borderless system for exacerbating a migrant crisis and demanding tighter European Union rules on free movement.
A surge in migrants fleeing war and poverty has presented Europe with its worst refugee crisis since World War Two and claimed the lives of thousands of people making perilous sea and land journeys to the continent.
Writing in The Sunday Times newspaper, May said the Schengen border code which eliminated systematic frontier controls across much of Europe, but which Britain is not part of, had fuelled the migrant crisis.
"The events of this summer have shown that the most tragic consequences of a broken European migration system have been borne by those at risk of exploitation," May wrote. "As countries in Europe are increasingly realising, these tragedies have been exacerbated by the European system of no borders."