The European Commission must introduce a common asylum and immigration policy

ABC, Madrid

Madrid's ABC says the deaths "show how urgently the European Commission must introduce a common asylum and immigration policy which stands up firmly to the mafia networks that make fortunes out of trading in humans".

"Every day of delay will help the expansion of the mafia organizations which take advantage of the continued existence of national borders... Only if the European Union accepts that its members share the same values of respect for human rights, will real European justice be possible," the paper says.

"The challenge of setting up one big border and introducing a common and much more open migration policy is out there and urgent", according to El Pais.

"Perhaps it is the Union's most important challenge," the paper adds.

Action needed beyond EU borders

But Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau warns against drawing rash conclusions about the need to reform European asylum legislation to counter the trade in smuggling immigrants.

"As long as the USA and Europe are economically and politically attractive enough for people to risk their lives getting there, racketeers will exist."

Dover a prime destination for illegals

"Those who smuggle people in return for money and coldly calculate the possibility of their death are criminals ... We can only try to put a stop to them through intensive police cooperation beyond the EU's national borders. If anything, it is here that action should be taken," the paper says.

Britain's asylum controversy

In a report from Dover, Le Monde says the tragedy "will be bound to revive the strong controversy over the fight against immigrants using the asylum procedure to secure the right to stay in Britain".

"For several months now the tabloid press has been waging a campaign, with inevitably racist undertones, against illegal immigrants," the paper says.

Emigration is a war. It will soon be necessary to erect a monument to the "unknown immigrant"

L'Unita, Rome

"The issue was successfully taken up by the opposition Conservatives in their bid to catch up with Labour in the opinion polls, and the Labour government, faced with pressure from the tabloids... was forced to tighten up rules deemed too lax."

Mourning the "unknown immigrant"

Italy's L'Unita takes a different line, reflecting on the terrible fate of the Chinese would-be immigrants, "buried alive", the paper says, in the container in which they were found.

The paper points out that the discovery of the bodies of illegal immigrants is becoming almost routine in parts of Europe. Many bodies are found each month on the shores of the Adriatic, others are dumped from the back of trucks in the countryside, yet others turn up in the holds of aircraft.

"Emigration is a war. It will soon be necessary to erect a monument to the "unknown immigrant", so that each of the thousands of families who have heard nothing more from their lost relatives might claim the "unknown immigrant" as their own," the paper says.

Echoing this sad reality, Budapest's Nepszabadsag recalls similar incidents in Hungary, where a total of 40 refugees, including Tamils, Albanians, Lebanese, Pakistanis and Afghans, have died since 1995, many of them drowning in the Tisza or the Danube rivers.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.