Éric Zemmour drew widespread outrage in September 2020 after a tirade against child migrants
A French court has found the far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour guilty of racist hate speech for a tirade against unaccompanied child migrants.
Zemmour drew widespread outrage in September 2020 when he told the CNews channel that child migrants were “thieves, killers, they’re rapists. That’s all they are. We should send them back.”
Continue reading...Care International report highlights ‘deep injustice’ neglected by world’s media, as extreme weather along with Covid wipes out decades of progress
From Afghanistan to Ethiopia, about 235 million people worldwide needed assistance in 2021. But while some crises received global attention, others are lesser known.
Humanitarian organisation Care International has published its annual report of the 10 countries that had the least attention in online articles in five languages around the world in 2021, despite each having at least 1 million people affected by conflict or climate disasters.
Continue reading...French government wants whole bloc to act despite warnings other member states have no appetite
France will press the EU to negotiate an asylum and migration treaty with the UK in an attempt to deter people from making the dangerous Channel crossing.
The French government, which last week took up the six-month rotating presidency of the EU council of ministers, wants the whole bloc to act, despite warnings that other member states have no appetite for a migration treaty with Britain.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Hong Kong
Continue reading...Thousands of Tigrayan migrants abused and deported from Saudi Arabia are forcibly detained in Ethiopia, Human Rights Watch says
Thousands of Tigrayans are being deported from Saudi Arabia and held in secret detention sites in Ethiopia, according to Human Rights Watch.
In a new report, the international rights organisation says it has identified two detention sites where thousands of people from the war-torn Tigray region of Ethiopia are being mistreated and forcibly disappeared. The sites, identified via satellite imagery, videos and witness accounts, in the towns of Semera and Shone are most likely used to detain Tigrayan deportees, HRW said.
Continue reading...Refugee charities want change of approach from government after 28,300 people crossed Channel in 2021
Refugee charities are urging the government to open safe routes or risk a new wave of fatalities in the Channel after the number of people who travelled to the UK by small boats trebled last year.
Data released on Tuesday shows that more than 28,300 people crossed the Channel in 2021, three times the number for 2020. The record number came despite tens of millions of pounds being spent by the home secretary, Priti Patel, on new measures to discourage the journeys.
Continue reading...Alexis Huguet’s image of this twin girl, born as her mother fled into Congo, captures the fragility of life in the Central African Republic
The picture is a joyful one. Laure, a midwife at a health facility in Ndu, a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, holds a healthy newborn girl. The baby’s mother, Ester, was at the health centre for a postnatal appointment after giving birth to twin daughters.
A couple of weeks earlier, when she was heavily pregnant and due to go into labour at any moment, Ester was forced to leave her home in Bangassou, on the other side of a river, in the neighbouring Central African Republic.
Continue reading...About 1,000 people, mostly Kurds, are waiting at a converted customs centre in Bruzgi for the chance to cross into EU
The giant warehouse towers over the Belarus countryside, less than a mile from the Polish border. In this 10,000 sq metre space patrolled by dozens of armed soldiers, 1,000 asylum seekers are crammed among countless industrial shelving units, held up on their way to Europe in the midst of a frigid winter.
“We’re trapped in this building,” says Alima Skandar, 40. “We don’t want to go back to Iraq and we can’t cross the border. Please, help us.”
Continue reading...From a factory in China to an English beach, rubber dinghies are acquired by people-smugglers to transport desperate people
Against the backdrop of Dunkirk’s busy port with its cranes and smoke, a collapsed, grey rubber dinghy lies on the shore, abandoned and washed in by the tide.
It is one of the many haunting signs of the thousands of desperate people who have attempted to cross the Channel from northern France.
Continue reading...Agents step in after incident involving two small boats in early hours of morning
UK authorities have rescued 67 people who were attempting to cross the Channel on Christmas Day.
Border Force agents took a group of people to Dover in Kent in the early hours of Saturday, after an incident involving two small boats.
Continue reading...People still missing despite major rescue effort as smugglers switch to more perilous route from Turkey
At least 16 people have died after a migrant boat capsized in the Aegean Sea late Friday, bringing to at least 30 the combined death toll from three accidents in as many days involving migrant boats in Greek waters.
The sinkings came as smugglers increasingly favour a perilous route from Turkey to Italy, which avoids Greece’s heavily patrolled eastern Aegean islands that for years were at the forefront of the country’s migration crisis.
Continue reading...From a Somali love story to a deep dive into Congolese rumba, Guardian writers pick their favourite recent world cinema releases
The Great Indian Kitchen
Continue reading...As thousands attempt to cross the Belarus-Poland border seeking asylum in Europe, local activists are trying to help
In the attic of a cottage in the woods near the Polish village of Narewka, a young Iraqi Kurd crouches, trembling with cold and fear. Through the skylight, the blue lights of police vans flash on the walls of his hiding place. Outside, dozens of border guards are searching for people like him in the snowstorm. Downstairs, the owner of the house sits in silence with his terrified wife and children.
The young Kurd is one of thousands of asylum seekers who entered Poland across the border with Belarus, where countless others have become trapped on their way to Europe. The Polish family have offered him shelter. But if the Polish police find him, he risks being sent back across the frontier into the sub-zero forests of Belarus, while his protectors risk being charged for aiding illegal immigration.
Continue reading...The pandemic has seen borders close and divisions widened. But in almost all aspects of life, humanity will only thrive by coming together
During the pandemic, the nations of the world set about energetically strengthening borders around themselves, and within themselves, as states restricted entry. During the early lockdowns, according to the UNHCR, 168 of the world’s 195 countries partially or entirely closed their borders. This hit refugees particularly hard. “Movement is vital for people who are in flight,” said Filippo Grandi, the head of UNHCR. “They save their lives, by running.”
The virus knows no borders; it is the ultimate globalist. Covid-19 put an end to the idea that the 19th-century European nation state is the political arrangement we should all aspire to. The nation state is an outdated concept, and ill serves the present emergency. The rich countries have frozen immigration. But when people can’t move, they also can’t earn. Global remittances – money sent back to their families by people working abroad – which amount to four times all the foreign aid given by the rich countries to the poor ones – have gone down two years in a row. Poor countries will be poorer.
Continue reading...Search and rescue operation under way near Folegandros as boat carrying as many as 50 people sinks
Greece’s coastguard says one person has died and dozens are feared missing after a boat sank off the coast of the island of Folegandros.
The body of the unidentified man was recovered during an ongoing search and rescue operation. The coastguard said 12 people, all believed to be from Iraq, had been rescued and transported to the nearby island of Santorini.
Continue reading...Authorities say mostly Iraqi Kurds drowned in the Channel dinghy incident, including a teenager and one child
French authorities have formally identified 26 out of 27 people who drowned last month in a Channel dinghy incident, with most of them being Kurds from Iraq.
A statement from the Paris prosecutor said that there were 17 men among the deceased aged 19-26, seven women aged 22-46, as well as a 16-year-old teenager and a child aged seven.
Continue reading...At least 53 people died and many were injured after the vehicle rolled over on a highway in Chiapas
A cargo truck jammed with more than 100 people thought to be migrants from Central America has rolled over and crashed into a pedestrian bridge in southern Mexico, killing at least 53 people and injuring dozens more.
The crash on Thursday on a highway near Tuxtla Gutierrez, state capital of Chiapas, might have been triggered by the weight of the truck’s human cargo causing it to tip over on a bend, local officials said.
Continue reading...France willing to re-engage on Channel crossings, but UK economy relies on illegal labour, says president
Relations between France and Britain are strained because the current UK government does not honour its word, president Emmanuel Macron has said.
Macron accused London of failing to keep its word on Brexit and fishing licences, but said France was willing to re-engage in good faith, and called for “British re-engagement” over the “humanitarian question” of dangerous Channel crossings, after at least 27 migrants drowned trying to reach the British coast.
Continue reading...The asylum seekers on the Poland-Belarus border are not aggressors: they are desperate pawns in a disgusting political struggle
One thought is a constant in my head: “I have kids at home, I cannot go to jail, I cannot go to jail.” The politics are beyond my reach or that of the victims on the Poland-Belarus border. It involves outgoing German chancellor, Angela Merkel, getting through to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. It’s ironic that this border has more than 50 media crews gathered, yet Poland is the only place in the EU where journalists cannot freely report.
Meanwhile, the harsh north European winter is closing in and my fingers are freezing in the dark snowy nights.
Continue reading...We map out the rising number of high-tech surveillance and deterrent systems facing asylum seekers along EU borders
From military-grade drones to sensor systems and experimental technology, the EU and its members have spent hundreds of millions of euros over the past decade on technologies to track down and keep at bay the refugees on its borders.
Poland’s border with Belarus is becoming the latest frontline for this technology, with the country approving last month a €350m (£300m) wall with advanced cameras and motion sensors.
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