GERMAN Foreign Minister Heiko Maas highlighted the importance of the Geneva Refugee Convention yesterday while modern-day refugees were left stranded in the Mediterranean.

The 1951 convention was “the response to the failure” at the 1938 Evian summit, Mr Maas said, referring to a 32-nation conference called with the idea of providing safe havens for hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing nazi Germany, but which closed with no nation apart from the Dominican Republic having agreed to accept significant numbers.

It “remains the binding measure of our humanity.”

But Germany said the same day it would accept just 50 of 450 people rescued from a fishing boat in the Mediterranean that was headed towards Lampedusa in Italy.

Italy has called on other EU states to take them in. France and Malta have between them agreed to take 100.

And it also announced that Bavarian state police would win the right to conduct border checks on agreement by federal police, part of demands for harsher border policing by the Christian Social Union-led government at Munich, whose leader until this year Horst Seehofer is now Germany’s interior minister.

• On Saturday, a UN official said that Algeria has resumed the practice of dumping large numbers of refugees in the Sahara along the Niger and Mali borders, leaving them to try to walk to safety for miles through searing heat. Many are believed to have died after being ditched in the desert.