Refugees and the EU: Human dignity is at stake An open letter to EU citizens and politicians Between May 22 and 25, 2014, EU citizens will elect new members to the European Parliament. We are researchers who have come together through an EU-funded COST Action project on ethical issues in disasters. We work in the fields of disaster medicine and ethics. As EU citizens, we believe that the EU response to the global refugee crisis violates human dignity. We urge our fellow EU voters to ensure that the candidates they support have shown clearly their adherence to the visionary and humane principles upon which the European Union was founded. The number of refugees and internally displaced people in the world is at crisis point. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) states that 23,000 people were forced to leave their homes every day in 2012. Over 45 million forcibly displaced people search for safety. The numbers for 2013 are not available yet, but trends showed the situation dete...