According to the Guardian newspaper reports, United Nations Special Representative Peter Sutherland has warned UK Prime Minister David Cameron not to neglect the refugee crisis as winter nears.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) � The United Nations Special Representative Peter Sutherland has warned UK Prime Minister David Cameron not to neglect the refugee crisis as winter nears, the Guardian newspaper reported Saturday.

"Are we going to allow refugees to stand in freezing rivers at our borders this winter, to live in freezing tents with their children� This is a distortion, this is a global responsibility, a European responsibility. Resettlement and relocation has to be part of the solution," Sutherland was quoted as saying.

In September, the European Commission announced a mandatory quota system to relocate some 160,000 refugees, who had arrived primarily to Italy, Greece and Hungary, among the bloc's member states.

Cameron rejected any UK involvement in the EU quota scheme, adding that his country would accept 20,000 migrants, exclusively from refugee camps in countries neighboring Syria, over the next five years.

Europe has been struggling to cope with a major refugee crisis as hundreds of thousands refugees flee war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. According to the EU border agency Frontex, over 710,000 migrants have already arrived in the bloc during the first nine months of 2015.
By Sputnik News