Category Archives: Migration

Matteo Salvini goes on trial over migrant kidnapping charges

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Former Italian interior minister accused of abusing power in incident involving 116 people

Italy’s far-right former interior minister Matteo Salvini goes on trial on Saturday on kidnapping charges over an incident in 2019 when 116 migrants were prevented from disembarking a coastguard ship in the Mediterranean.

Prosecutors in the Sicilian city of Catania accuse the League party leader of abusing his powers to block people from disembarking from the Gregoretti coastguard boat under his “closed ports” policy.

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Thousands of migrants cross into Guatemala with slim hopes of reaching US

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The caravan from Honduras is the biggest since the pandemic hit Central America in March, triggering a rise in unemployment and poverty

Thousands of Honduran migrants hoping to reach the United States have entered Guatemala, testing the newly reopened frontier that had been shut by the coronavirus pandemic.

Authorities had planned to register the migrants as they crossed and offer assistance to those willing to turn back, but early on Thursday, the group pushed past armed guards without registering. By midday more than 3,000 migrants had crossed illegally, said Guatemalan officials.

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UK asylum detention: top civil servant says ‘all options on the table’

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Matthew Rycroft tells MPs civil service is considering all ways to improve migration system

The top civil servant at the Home Office has said “all options are on the table” for the migration system, in response to reports officials were asked to consider proposals to hold refugees in offshore detention centres, including remote islands in the south Atlantic.

Matthew Rycroft, the department’s permanent secretary, said the Cabinet Office would lead an inquiry into the leak of documents that revealed officials were asked to consider “possible options for negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru”.

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‘Catastrophe for human rights’ as Greece steps up refugee ‘pushbacks’

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Human rights groups condemn practice as evidence reviewed by the Guardian reveals systemic denial of entry to asylum seekers

At about 1am on 24 August, Ahmed (not his real name) climbed into a rubber dinghy with 29 others and left Turkey’s north-western Çanakkale province. After 30 minutes, he said, they reached Greek waters near Lesbos and a panther boat from the Hellenic coastguard approached.

Eight officers in blue shorts and shirts, some wearing black masks and armed with rifles, forced the group – more than half women and including several minors and six small children – to come aboard at gunpoint. They punctured the dinghy with knives and it sank. “They said they would take us to a camp,” said Ahmed. “The children were happy and started laughing, but I knew they were lying.”

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EU’s migration proposals draw anger on left and leave questions unanswered

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One Dutch MEP compared the plans to the far right while Von der Leyen’s party called them ‘a good starting point’

The EU home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, hopes migration will become just another “normal policy area”, even “boring”.

Since more than 1 million refugees arrived in Europe in 2015, migration has been neither “boring” nor easy for the bloc. Leaders have flung accusations at each other, exposing painful divisions. In 2015, Italy’s then prime minister told his fellow leaders they were “time wasters”, who didn’t deserve to call themselves Europeans. Central European countries accused their neighbours of trying to “blackmail” them.

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EU proposes to ditch refugee quotas for member states

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Countries would be offered €10,000 an adult to take people in under ‘solidarity à la carte’ plan

The European commission is abandoning the idea of mandatory refugee quotas, as it revives an attempt to change Europe’s asylum and migration rules after more than four years of deadlock.

The long-awaited migration proposals, delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, would allow EU member states to choose whether to accept refugees, or take charge of returning those denied asylum to their home countries.

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Internal displacements reach 15m in 2020 with worst ‘still to come’ – report

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Extreme weather, locust invasions and violence have forced people to flee their homes

Millions of people were uprooted from their homes by conflict, violence and natural disasters in the first six months of this year, research has found.

Nearly 15m new internal displacements were recorded in more than 120 countries between January and June by the Swiss-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).

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‘We pick your food’: migrant workers speak out from Spain’s ‘Plastic Sea’

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In Almería’s vast farms, migrants pick food destined for UK supermarkets. But these ‘essential workers’ live in shantytowns and lack PPE as Covid cases soar

Photographs and drone footage by Ofelia de Pablo and Javier Zurita

It is the end of another day for Hassan, a migrant worker from Morocco who has spent the past 12 hours under a sweltering late summer sun harvesting vegetables in one of the vast greenhouses of Almería, southern Spain.

The vegetables he has dug from the red dirt are destined for dinner plates all over Europe. UK supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Lidl and Aldi all source fruit and vegetables from Almería. The tens of thousands of migrant workers working in the province are vital to the Spanish economy and pan-European food supply chains. Throughout the pandemic, they have held essential worker status, labouring in the fields while millions across the world sheltered inside.

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Home Office plans to evict thousands of refused asylum seekers

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People in England whose cases have been refused will be given 21 days to leave UK, letter states

Thousands of asylum seekers currently accommodated in hotels are facing removal from the UK, the Home Office has announced.

A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Independent, states that evictions of refused asylum seekers will take place “with immediate effect” and charities have reported an increase in people being held in immigration detention centres.

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Dozens jump from NGO rescue ship in attempt to reach Sicily – video

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Dozens of people made a perilous jump from the Proactiva Open Arms in an attempt to reach Sicily, in the largest known incident of its kind this year.

The Spanish NGO said 124 of the 273 people on the boat jumped into the water between Thursday and Friday in an attempt to swim to Palermo's port.

They were rescued by the Italian coastguard and brought to safety after Proactiva's crew waited 10 days for authorisation to disembark their passengers

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Dozens jump from migrant rescue ship in attempt to reach Sicily

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Italian coastguard rescues 124 people, who had been waiting 10 days to disembark

Dozens of people have jumped from an NGO migrant rescue ship in an attempt to reach Sicily, after the crew waited 10 days for authorisation to disembark their passengers.

The Spanish NGO Open Arms said 124 of the 273 refugees and migrants on its Proactiva Open Arms boat, leaped into the water during the largest-known incident of its kind.

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UK awards border contract to firm criticised over role in US deportations

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Exclusive: tech firm Palantir has come under fire for links to Trump’s drive to eject migrants

The government has awarded oversight of the UK’s post-Brexit border and customs data to Palantir, an American tech firm notorious for assisting the Trump administration’s drive to deport migrants from the US.

Palantir, whose co-founder Peter Thiel has been a vocal supporter of Trump, was formally awarded a contract last week to manage the data analytics and architecture of the UK’s new “border flow tool”, which will collate data on the transit of goods and customs from 31 December, according to a Cabinet Office document seen by the Guardian.

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Refugees demand rescue from Lesbos after Moria camp blaze

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Greek authorities struggle to persuade former camp residents to move to a new temporary site as protests continue

Greece is facing mounting demands from refugees displaced by the devastating Moria refugee camp fire to either let them leave Lesbos or deport them.

The Greek authorities are struggling to persuade former residents of the camp to move to a new temporary site, and many people continue to sleep on the streets of the island.

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‘I need freedom’: refugees approved for resettlement stranded on Nauru as processing stalls

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Delays are causing further suffering for almost 200 refugees whose requests for transfer or resettlement were approved in 2019

A group of almost 200 refugees on Nauru who have had either medical transfers or resettlement requests approved since 2019 still remain on the island, and their cases have stalled, despite the Coalition claiming to have dealt with the backlog.

The delays and policy inertia is causing further suffering for refugees and raises questions about why the resettlement and medevac processes have ground to a halt.

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Three Rohingya refugees die days after seven-month ordeal on trafficking boat

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300 people disembarked in Indonesia in a ‘terrible condition’ after being held hostage at sea by traffickers demanding payment

At least three young Rohingya refugees have died this week since landing in Indonesia after seven months at sea, relief workers have said.

After being refused entry by several countries and held hostage at sea by traffickers, 296 refugees disembarked in Aceh province on Monday, weak and in poor health. Two-thirds of them were women and children.

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‘It’s unbearable’: Lesbos refugees sleep on streets after devastating fire

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Residents of Moria camp struggle to salvage what they can as protesters try to block efforts to rebuild

Plumes of smoke rise above the ashes and twisted metal. In many parts this is all that remains of Europe’s largest refugee camp.

Just a few days ago, the Moria camp in Lesbos was home to thousands of children and their families. Now all that is left are the smoldering ruins and jagged outlines of scorched tents.

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EU official says asylum policy impasse ‘part of the problem’ at Moria

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Ylva Johansson says EU working to reduce number of refugees and migrants on Greek islands

A senior EU official has said Europe’s failure to agree a common migration and asylum policy was partly responsible for the “unacceptable” conditions at the Moria camp on Lesbos that burned to the ground this week, leaving more than 12,000 people without shelter.

Ylva Johansson, the European commissioner for home affairs, said that when she took office in December 2019, the situation for 40,000 refugees and migrants living on Greek islands was “unsustainable and unacceptable”.

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‘Catastrophe’ warning as thousands left homeless by Lesbos refugee camp fire

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NGOs accuse police of blocking access to hospital for families and vulnerable migrants injured in Moria blaze

NGOs in Lesbos have warned that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding on the roads around the still burning Moria camp, where thousands of migrants are allegedly being held by police without shelter or adequate medical help.

Annie Petros, head coordinator of of the charity Becky’s Bathhouse, said she was blocked by police from taking injured people to hospital as she drove them away from the fire.

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Lesbos refugee camp fire forces thousands to evacuate

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Blaze at overcrowded Moria camp destroys tents and forced migrants to flee

The Greek prime minister has convened an urgent meeting of cabinet ministers after a devastating fire gutted the overcrowded Moria migrant facility on Lesbos, leaving 13,000 people without shelter.

As riot police were dispatched from Athens to the island, the regional governor for the north Aegean, Kostas Mountzouris, called for a state of emergency to be declared, saying the situation was out of control.

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Woman who helped deported Syrians ‘ashamed of UK government’

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Barbara Pomfret came to aid of group left homeless in Madrid after forced removal from UK

A British woman living in Spain who helped 11 Syrian asylum seekers who were left homeless and hungry on the streets of Madrid after being forcibly removed from the UK has said she is ashamed of the UK government’s behaviour.

The all-male group were left destitute after being put on a flight to Madrid by the Home Office last week. They had arrived in the UK in small boats from Calais and are part of a Home Office plan to remove almost 1,000 such arrivals.

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