MEPs yesterday approved a new EU-wide surveillance system – Eurosur – to beef up border control and help prevent deaths at sea.

Proposed by the European Commission, the system will be officially launched in December with a budget of more than €200 million for the coming seven years. It will include the deployment of drones, satellite systems and high-resolution cameras and the sharing of information among member states.

Individual member states will be better equipped to prevent, detect and combat illegal migration by sharing real-time images and data on developments in the EU’s external borders.

The vote in Strasbourg comes just a week after a boat with about 500 asylum seekers, mostly Eritrean and Somali, sunk off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, leaving at least 280 people dead.

The approval of the system, however, is not linked to the tragedy as it had been planned for some months.

Jan Mulder, a Dutch Liberal MEP who acted as rapporteur on the dossier about the new system, said a proper border surveillance system could prevent the Mediterranean from becoming a graveyard for refugees and asylum seekers.

EU countries using the new system will be required to respect human rights, including the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits returning a person to a place where his/her life or freedoms could be threatened.

The latest move is another in a series of initiatives taken by the EU to help member states deal better with the migration phenomenon. On Italy’s initiative, the Commission, earlier this week, agreed to set up a task force that would look at the broader situation in the Mediterranean and come up with new initiates of cooperation between member states. Malta supported this initiative.

The EU’s border control agency, Frontex, has also been tasked to prepare a plan of possible search and rescue operations aimed at saving lives of irregular migrants who find themselves in difficulty while crossing to Europe from North Africa.