Fast-track scheme is aimed at those whose jobs put them at risk in pandemic
France has granted citizenship to more than 12,000 frontline workers whose jobs put them at risk during the Covid pandemic under a special fast-track scheme.
As well as speeding up the application process, which normally takes up to two years, the government also cut the residency requirement from five years to two.
Continue reading...An innovative community project has brightened buildings, ‘brought people together’ and provided an emotional outlet after traumatic journeys
Jadhav*, 18, from Bangladesh, arrived in Italy 10 months ago, but is still haunted by memories of his journey with people smugglers across the Mediterranean Sea.
“There were 156 people packed into a small boat. There were women and children,” says Jadhav in broken Italian and Bengali translated on a smartphone app. “Waves were coming over the side. People were weeping. There was no hope of survival.”
Continue reading...Athens calls for a united response, as refugees already in Lesbos hope their asylum claims will now be reconsidered
Greek officials have said that Greece will not become a “gateway” to Europe for Afghan asylum seekers and have called for a united response to predictions of an increase in refugee arrivals to the country.
Greece’s prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has spoken to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, about the developing situation in Afghanistan this week. Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi last week said: “We cannot have millions of people leaving Afghanistan and coming to the European Union … and certainly not through Greece.” The country has just completed a 25-mile (40km) wall along its land border with Turkey and installed an automated surveillance system with cameras, radars and drones.
Continue reading...The woman, who was trying to make the trip from Africa, was found lying next to two bodies and ‘in a bad state’, officials say
About 40 migrants are feared dead after rescuers recovered a lone woman clinging to an overturned dinghy that had been carrying dozens of people trying to reach the Canary Islands.
A rescue helicopter carrying the survivor – a 30-year-old woman who appeared exhausted and shaken – landed at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria airport on Tuesday, after a cargo ship found her 135 miles off the coast.
Continue reading...From Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca to wildlife tourism in Nepal, we find out how the crisis has affected people in four travel hotspots – and whether or not they want the tourists to return
In March last year, it was predicted that the global travel shutdown would cause international arrivals to plummet by 20 to 30% by the end of 2020.
Six weeks later, the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) revised their warning: international arrivals could fall by up to 80% – equating to a billion fewer tourists and the worst crisis in the history of the industry.
Continue reading...A record number of people are expected to cross the Channel to the UK in small boats this year to claim asylum.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, more than 10,000 people have already made the dangerous and potentially fatal 21-mile journey across the busiest shipping lane in the world. On 4 August, 482 migrants crossed the Channel – a record for a single day.
The Guardian journalist Diane Taylor explains what is driving people to take the enormous risk
Continue reading...Life and death on the Atlantic migrant route. Plus, is it too late to halt global heating?
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When we think of Europe’s migrant crisis, much of our attention understandably focuses on Mediterranean sea crossings from North Africa. But the Guardian Weekly’s big story this week casts light on another deadly route, from Africa’s western coast to the Spanish Atlantic territory of the Canary Islands. While official death rates are comparatively low, concerns are growing that undocumented fatalities on this extremely dangerous crossing could be many times higher. Sam Jones reports from Gran Canaria.
As extreme weather-fuelled wildfires continued to blaze in several parts of the world this week, a major new report from hundreds of top scientists laid bare the severe extent of our damage to the Earth’s climate and the disaster looming if the slim chance to avert global heating above 1.5C is not grasped. Environment editor Damian Carrington analyses what the IPCC report means, while on our Opinion pages, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, warns starkly that only a complete transformation of our societies can now arrest the warming process.
Necoclí, population 20,000, faces bottleneck as Covid rules lift and unrest, poverty and violence grow across region
When the loudspeaker announced that the day’s last boat across Colombia’s Gulf of Urabá would begin boarding, a desperate scrum of Haitians rushed forward, jostling for spaces on the rickety craft.
Most had been stuck in this remote Caribbean coastal town for days, trapped in a migration bottleneck caused by the loosening of Covid travel restrictions and growing unrest, poverty and violence across the region.
Continue reading...Every year thousands of refugees from conflict, climate and instability in Africa board vessels in search of a new life in Europe but hundreds never arrive
At 6.30am on Friday 28 May, three fishermen at work four miles off the southern coast of Tobago spotted a large white boat adrift on the dawn waters of the Caribbean.
As they drew closer, the trio saw the boat’s shape was far from local, and noticed a strong smell coming from inside it. The body the fishermen glimpsed at the bow was enough to confirm their suspicions. They called the coastguard who, unable to dispatch a vessel, asked them to tow the boat ashore at Belle Garden beach.
Continue reading...As violence causes a fresh wave of desperate journeys, populist politicians claim their country has become a ‘dumping ground’
It was a journey that had taken weeks, and there were times when the 65-year-old Afghan widow, who walks with the aid of a stick, had to be carried by her son.
Their trek, across 15 canyons she says, left Durdana with badly scarred feet. “I have not had a day of peace in over 40 years. I had to come to Turkey, there was no choice.”
Continue reading...The increasingly draconian approach to irregular migration betrays the spirit of the 1951 refugee convention
Seventy years ago, the 1951 UN refugee convention established the rights of refugees to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them. Increasingly, it seems that much of Europe is choosing to commemorate the anniversary by ripping up some of the convention’s core principles.
So far this year, close to 1,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, more than four times the death toll for the same period in 2020. Many will have been economic migrants. Others will have been fleeing persecution. Increasingly, Europe does not care. All were “irregular”. And all must be discouraged and deterred through a strategy of cruelty.
Continue reading...Activists fear a ‘dangerous precedent’ being set as Copenhagen uses a report that deems Damascus safe to deny residency status
Denmark’s attempt to return hundreds of Syrians to Damascus after deeming the city safe will “set a dangerous precedent” for other countries to do the same, say lawyers who are preparing to take the Danish government to the European court of human rights (ECHR) over the issue.
Authorities in Denmark began rejecting Syrian refugees’ applications for renewal of temporary residency status last summer, and justified the move because a report had found the security situation in some parts of the country had “improved significantly”. About 1,200 people from Damascus currently living in Denmark are believed to be affected by the policy.
Continue reading...As the conflict intensifies amid the withdrawal of US-led forces, a new wave of families are being forced to flee via perilous routes to Iran and Turkey
A weary Zebah Gul and her eight children are gathered quietly in a small room at a transit centre in Herat, north-eastern Afghanistan. Their six-month attempt to escape the war and find safety has failed.
They have just spent a week in Iranian police detention after being caught trying to cross the border into Turkey, and are beginning to make their way back to their besieged home province of Takhar, on the opposite side of the sprawling country.
Continue reading...Sitting in a small dinghy in darkness as it took on water was frightening enough in a sea survival exercise let alone for real
As I paddled through crashing waves in the darkness, stomach churning, I watched our small dinghy starting to fill up with water with a sinking feeling – it wouldn’t be long before we went overboard, and I was worried that at least one person in my boat was paddling in the wrong direction. But, then again, it might have been me: I was wielding an oar twice my size and it was impossible to tell in the frenzy.
Before we knew it the odyssey was over and the lights were back on. I emerged soaked through – with aching muscles and shot nerves – relieved to be out of the water.
This was the RNLI’s sea survival pool, used to train volunteers in the rigours of life-or-death aquatic rescue. All I had done was traverse a 25-metre swimming pool four times, but it was enough to assure me that repeating that at least 325 more times across the Channel would be a deeply traumatic experience. What’s more, it is a journey that would probably be much longer as a migrant is, in many cases, guided by only a smartphone compass.
Continue reading...Lifeboat charity says it is its moral and legal duty to rescue people at risk of dying as they cross Channel
The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) has hit out at accusations it is operating a “migrant taxi service” by rescuing people at risk of dying in the water as they cross the Channel in small boats, which the charity says is its moral and legal duty.
Responding to accusations from Nigel Farage that it is facilitating illegal immigration, the volunteer lifeboat charity said it was “very proud” of its humanitarian work and it would continue to respond to coastguard callouts to rescue at-risk Channel migrants in line with its legal duty under international maritime law.
Continue reading...International Organization for Migration links rise in deaths to decrease in sea patrols
At least 57 people have died after a migrant boat capsized off the Libyan coast, taking the total death toll in the central Mediterranean in 2021 to almost 1,000 – four times as many as in the same period last year.
Flavio Di Giacomo, Italy’s spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said the shipwreck raised the death toll to 987. “Last year there were 272. We must no longer hesitate, and do everything to strengthen the system of patrols at sea,” he said.
Continue reading...Fragile health systems are at risk due to high numbers of medical staff leaving to work in richer countries, say experts
The loss of frontline health workers dying of Covid around the globe, is being compounded in the hospitals of developing nations by trained medical staff leaving to help in the pandemic effort abroad, according to experts.
With new Covid waves in Africa, and with Latin America and Asia facing unrelenting health emergencies, the number of health worker deaths from Covid-19 in May was at least 115,000, according to the World Health Organization. Its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, acknowledged data is “scant” and the true figure is likely to be far higher.
Continue reading...The Cameroonians, who had ‘no idea’ they had jumped into the demilitarised area, have been trapped for almost two months
A few months after Grace Ngo flew into Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus from her native Cameroon, she decided to head “for the west”. Smugglers pointed the student in the direction of the Venetian walls that cut through the heart of Nicosia, Europe’s last divided capital.
A little before midnight on 24 May, Ngo leapt from the breakaway Turkish Cypriot republic into what she hoped would be the war-divided island’s internationally recognised Greek south.
Continue reading...Families spread across rich and poor countries are acutely aware of relatives’ lack of access to vaccine
For months she had been dreaming of it and finally Susheela Moonsamy was able to do it: get together with her relatives and give them a big hug. Throughout the pandemic she had only seen her siblings, nieces and nephews fully “masked up” at socially distanced gatherings. But a few weeks ago, as their home state of California pressed on with its efficient vaccination rollout, they could have a proper reunion.
“It was such an emotional experience, we all hugged each other; and with tears in our eyes, we thanked God for being with us and giving us the opportunity to see each other close up again and actually touch each other,” she says. “We never valued a hug from our family members that much before.”
Continue reading...Bill would give home secretary power to take action against citizens of countries deemed not to be cooperating
The UK will block visas for visitors from countries the home secretary believes are refusing to cooperate in taking back rejected asylum seekers or offenders.
In proposed legislation published on Tuesday, Priti Patel and future home secretaries would have the power to suspend or delay the processing of applications from countries that do no “cooperate with the UK government in relation to the removal from the United Kingdom of nationals of that country who require leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom but do not have it”.
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