Category Archives: Migration

Union considers legal action over Channel refugee ‘pushbacks’

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Border Force staff express concern at Priti Patel’s proposed tactic of forcing boats back to France

Border Force guards, who the government says will be asked to turn refugee boats in the Channel around, are considering applying for a judicial review to stop the tactic from being used.

Officers from the PCS union have said they are prepared to launch a high court challenge to the lawfulness of Priti Patel’s plans. The home secretary has maintained that the tactic of intercepting and sending back boats to France would be within the law.

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Polish PM urges ‘concrete steps’ by Nato to address border crisis

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EU to impose new sanctions against Lukashenko regime as dozens of asylum seekers reportedly break through from Belarus

The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, has called for Nato to take “concrete steps” to solve the migrant crisis on Europe’s border as dozens of asylum seekers reportedly broke through Poland’s border defences with Belarus.

Morawiecki said that Poland, Lithuania and Latvia may ask for consultations under article 4 of the Nato charter, indicating they believe their territorial integrity, political independence or security is threatened.

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‘I loved my job in the police. Then the Taliban came for me’

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After a vicious beating, Fatima Ahmadi fled Afghanistan with her children for Pakistan. But her pleas for asylum in the west are met by silence

Fatima Ahmadi only stopped screaming when the Taliban held a knife to her child’s throat, and told her: “Shut up, or we will kill your son.” They had burst into the policewoman’s Kabul home one late September morning, demanding she hand over her weapons. She told the Taliban she had no guns at home, but they said she was lying, ransacked the house, then began beating her, pulling out handfuls of hair, and when she would not stop shouting, they grabbed her nine-year-old son.

The knife was pressed so violently into his throat it left a red welt, visible in photographs seen by the Observer. Ahmadi’s back was covered with bruising from an assault so vicious that she lost control of her bodily functions. The men eventually left, but with an ominous warning. “We will come back.”

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Far from the border forest, Minsk and Moscow dictate refugees’ fate

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President Lukashenko is using a humanitarian crisis to further his own ends – but his success depends on which path Putin follows

Gunshots echo through the forest as Belarusian soldiers fire warning shots to drive back terrified asylum-seekers from Iraq and Syria seeking aid. Along the border, Polish and Belarusian troops eye each other warily through razor wire fence. At night, Polish guards say they’ve been blinded by Belarusians wielding strobe lights and lasers as migrants sneak across.

Asylum seekers have described hellish conditions in the forests and at improvised campsites, where they chop branches for firewood and ration water to survive. The body of a young Syrian man was found in the forest in Poland on Friday, at least the ninth person to have died this year. Others have been beaten by attackers and thieves waiting in the forest.

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Brexit has made it easier for small boat crossings to reach UK, refugees say

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Outside EU, people can no longer be returned to other European countries under legislation known as Dublin regulation

Refugees living in northern France say Brexit has made it easier for them to reach the UK in small boats, as it emerged that record numbers of people crossed the Channel in one day.

Despite the worsening weather conditions and the UK government’s attempts to deter them, 1,185 people made the crossing on Thursday, according to the Home Office.

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‘We are stranded’: man describes hardship on Poland-Belarus border as crisis deepens – video report

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A migrant man stranded on the Poland-Belarus border along with thousands of other people made a plea to authorities for help on Thursday. Speaking in Kurdish, the unidentified man described the problems migrants were facing without any amenities or essential items. Countries bordering Belarus have warned the migrant crisis on the European Union's eastern borders could escalate into a military confrontation. Meanwhile, the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko hinted at shutting down gas supplies to Europe on Thursday amid the escalating migration dispute with the EU.

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Belarus threatens to cut gas deliveries to EU if sanctioned over border crisis

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Lukashenko responds to possible sanctions as thousands of migrants camp in freezing temperatures at Poland border

Alexander Lukashenko has threatened to cut deliveries of gas to Europe via a major pipeline as the Belarusian leader promised to retaliate against any new EU sanctions imposed in response to the crisis at the Poland-Belarus border.

Backed by the Kremlin, Lukashenko has struck a defiant note after inciting a migrant crisis at the border, where thousands of people, mainly from Middle Eastern countries, are camped out as temperatures plunge below freezing.

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Poland-Belarus crisis volunteers: ‘Border police can be very aggressive’

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Grupa Granica strives to bring supplies to stranded migrants and help them deal with border officers

The call came in at about 1.30pm in the afternoon. A group of 15 people, all Iraqi Kurds, had been found in the woods of Narewka after managing to cross the border from Belarus into Poland. One woman could barely walk. Others had early signs of hypothermia.

The young volunteer who answered the phone – one of about 40 members of Grupa Granica, a Polish network of NGOs monitoring the situation on the border – knew they had to act quickly.

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‘Unacceptable’: migrants face ‘desperate situation’ at Poland-Belarus border

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Children and families among those being warned to ‘go back to Minsk’ as police hostility and humanitarian crisis worsens

For two days the same looped recording has been blaring out from speakers on the Polish border: “Attention! Attention! Crossing the Polish border is legal only at border crossings.”

The ominous warning is directed at the thousands of asylum seekers massed in Belarus on the opposite side of the barbed wire running between the two countries.

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Poland-Belarus border crisis: what is going on and who is to blame?

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Thousands of migrants are in the freezing region trying to get into Poland and aid is prevented from reaching them

More than 1,000 people, many fleeing dangerous conditions in Middle Eastern countries, arrived en masse at Poland’s border with Belarus this week, in a dramatic escalation of a simmering migration crisis on the edge of the EU. They had been escorted to the border by Belarusian authorities.

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Germany urges unity as crisis worsens for migrants at Poland-Belarus border

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German interior minister says Poland needs support to deal with ‘hybrid threat’ of politically organised migration

Germany needs to get the “whole of the democratic world” onboard to support orderly immigration to Europe, its interior minister has said, amid a worsening crisis at the Poland-Belarus border.

Horst Seehofer accused Belarus and Russia of exploiting refugees and migrants in an attempt to destabilise the west, and said EU countries must stand together in the face of a “hybrid threat” posed by “politically organised migration”.

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Belarus escorts hundreds of migrants towards Polish border

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Column of up to 500 people including children led by border guards in escalation of deadly crisis

Belarusian authorities have escorted as many as 500 people, most of whom are from the Middle East, to the Polish border in an escalation of a deadly crisis that has already left people desperate to reach the EU trapped between borders and at least seven dead due to exposure.

Videos published by Belarusian media on Monday showed armed Belarusian border guards in combat fatigues escorting the column of people, which included families with children, along a highway from the border town of Bruzgi and towards a forest that runs alongside Poland’s Podlaskie region.

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‘A moment in history’: making a perilous sea-crossing with refugees – photo essay

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Ahead of a UK exhibition of her photo series Journey in the Death Boat, Güliz Vural describes travelling with Syrians being smuggled to Greece from Turkey

Standing on a Turkish beach ready to join a group of Syrian refugees on an inflatable boat bound for Greece, the photojournalist Güliz Vural’s biggest fear was that the people traffickers organising the illegal crossing would not let her onboard.

If she had known that within a few hours of leaving Turkey she would be under arrest, accused of people trafficking herself, she would have thought twice about the journey.

The migrants carry the inflatable boat they will travel in down to the beach. They had to leave all their possessions as they crammed themselves in. Nearly 50 Syrians made the crossing in a boat designed to carry 12 people, adding to the anxiety felt by the children in particular.

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On the frozen frontiers of Europe with the migrants caught in a lethal game

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Asylum seekers are pawns in a conflict between Poland and Belarus

On the outskirts of the Białowieża forest – which bestrides the border between south-east Poland and Belarus – a group of seven Iraqi Kurds make their weary way towards the Polish hamlet of Grodzisk.

The latest miles of their journey have been from Belarus – crossing back and forth twice, deported after their first and second attempts. Now a third time: through sub-zero temperatures, across the primeval forest’s marshy terrain. Among them are two children: an eight-month-old girl and a two-year-old boy. When we came upon them, they were afraid to get up off the ground and begged us not to call the police, whispering: “They’ll kill us.”

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British woman wins legal battle against Australia’s ‘backpacker tax’

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Australia’s high court finds the higher rate of tax for working holiday makers is discriminatory and breaches treaty with UK

A British backpacker who worked as a waiter in Sydney has won a long-running legal dispute against Australia’s “backpacker tax” in its highest court.

On Wednesday the high court ruled in favour of Catherine Addy, finding the tax which slugged working holiday-makers thousands of dollars more than Australians discriminated against her on the basis of her nationality and infringed a treaty Australia signed with the UK.

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Life, death and limbo in the Calais ‘Jungle’ – five years after its demolition

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The refugee camp became notorious in 2015, as 1 million people fled war and danger to come to Europe. Years after it was demolished, 2,000 migrants are still waiting there, at the centre of a political storm

A small group of Ethiopian and Eritrean men stand shoeless and shivering in Calais. A few hours earlier, they almost drowned in the Channel, trying to cross to the UK. They got into difficulty when the motor on their boat failed. Their jeans are stiff and sodden with sand and seawater.

“We called the French coastguard to rescue us but they told us to call the English coastguard,” says one man. “Eventually, the French rescued us and brought us back to Calais.

Migrants and police at the ‘Old Lidl’ site in Calais. The police clear the site regularly, evicting anyone living there and seizing remaining belongings.

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Little Amal’s journey: the puppet that crossed Europe – in pictures

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Since leaving Turkey in July, Little Amal, a 3.5 metre (11ft 5in) tall puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian girl, and her entourage of about 25 people have navigated Covid border restrictions to walk across Europe to the UK. Amal, whose name means hope in Arabic, was created by Handspring, the company that made the equine puppets in War Horse. The puppet represents the millions of children forced to leave their homes in desperate situations. The global pandemic has made them more vulnerable than ever

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A nurse’s journey from treating Covid in Brazil to death in the US desert

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Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depression

As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.

“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”

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Poland criticised over stranded migrants after seventh death at border

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Identity documents suggest latest person to die was 24-year-old Syrian who arrived in Belarus last month

Polish police have found another body near the border with Belarus amid fresh allegations that Warsaw is breaking international law in its treatment of migrants stranded in harrowing conditions on the EU’s eastern frontier.

The man’s body was spotted in a field by a helicopter crew, police said, bringing to seven the number of people reported by Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Belarusian authorities to have died trying to cross the border since the summer.

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‘He lives freely, I live in fear’: the plight of India’s abandoned wives

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Activists highlight the poverty, stigma and abuse faced by women deserted by spouses living abroad

Kamala Reddy*, 33, a software engineer from Andhra Pradesh, married Vijay Kumar* in a traditional Hindu wedding in 2012. Kumar, who was working in the UK, was chosen by Reddy’s family. “But he didn’t take me to the UK after our marriage. He made excuses such as problems with the visa and so on,” says Reddy.

In 2016, Reddy became pregnant. Under pressure from the family, Kumar brought her to England. On arrival, she was shocked to discover Kumar’s secret. He had a British partner, two children and a stepchild. Neither Kumar’s nor Reddy’s families knew about the other family. Kumar threatened to leave Reddy if she told anyone.

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