European Union leaders have pledged to act to stop even more boat people drowning in the Mediterranean as Italy reported 700 people plucked to safety off Sicily overnight.
The rescues come three weeks after 400 refugees fleeing conflict in Africa and Syria perished in dramas that shocked the continent.
"The EU cannot accept that thousands of people die at our borders," Jose Manuel Barroso, who heads the European Commission, the EU's executive, said at the close of a two-day summit.
"The scale of the tragedy in the Mediterranean means we have to act now."
Expressing "deep sadness" over the recent deaths just as Italy reported 700 more boat people were plucked to safety overnight off Sicily in six rescue operations, EU leaders agreed on three principles - prevention, protection and solidarity.
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Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta welcomed the pledge of "solidarity" as a new step in efforts to craft a common migration policy and take joint action on the pressing but politically-sensitive issue of migration flows.
A proposed EU action plan, as well as a rethink on broad migration and refugee issues, were pushed back however to EU summit meetings in December and June 2014, a final summit statement said.
Countries on the bloc's southern fringe - Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Spain, and Croatia on the EU's Balkans frontier - complain they cannot cope with the boatloads of would-be migrants and have pleaded for help from wealthier neighbours in northern Europe.
But as anti-immigrant parties pick up support across the crisis-hit bloc, how to accommodate more foreigners while unemployment nudges record highs remains politically explosive.
Northern nations moreover claim to be sharing the burden already, with the lion's share of refugees ultimately finding shelter in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, which take in 70 per cent of those fleeing conflict.
As conflict in Syria continues unrelentingly, Europe fears further migratory pressure on its external borders.
French President Francois Hollande warned the pressure would continue as Africans fleeing chaos in Eritrea and Somalia boarded vessels in Libya "which is no longer able to police its borders".
Italy says migrant numbers increased fourfold this year to 30,000, Spain says twice as many Africans - 3000 - have tried to slip through its barbed-wire exclave of Melilla in Morocco this year, and Bulgaria reports seven times as many people trying to cross its border illegally in 2013.
