Border agency Frontex accused by campaigners and MEPs of evading its responsibilities towards people in distress
The EU has been accused of condemning migrants to death by critics of its recent €100m (£90m) deals for drone surveillance over the Mediterranean Sea.
Campaigners and MEPs have accused the EU’s border agency Frontex of investing in technology to monitor migrants from afar and skirt its responsibilities towards people in distress.
Continue reading...Instances of alleged beatings and sexual assaults against asylum seekers continue to blight special units
Croatia has dismissed allegations of violence by its border patrol after new reports emerged this week of border police allegedly beating, robbing and sexually abusing migrants.
On Wednesday the head of home affairs for the European Commission, Ylva Johansson, said that she was taking the allegations “very seriously”.
Continue reading...Testimony from asylum seekers alleging brutal border pushbacks, including sexual abuse, adds to calls for EU to investigate
People on the Balkans migrant trail have allegedly been whipped, robbed and, in one case, sexually abused by members of the Croatian police.
The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) has documented a series of brutal pushbacks on the Bosnia-Croatian border involving dozens of asylum seekers between 12 and 16 October.
Continue reading...Australia’s border policies continue to be felt in a country where almost 14,000 refugees and asylum seekers endure a ‘painful, hopeful wait’ to be resettled
From the ferry terminal in Batam, a city on Indonesia’s far north-western border, you can look across the narrow strait to Singapore. But only a short walk from the waterfront, more than 200 men are passing listless days and curfewed nights in cramped dorm rooms. Men sit in rows under the tropical sun, raising their arms in crosses above their heads and chanting, “Seven years in limbo! Enough, enough!”
They are bored, but buffed. Their DIY gym equipment offers some reprieve: old buckets filled with cement, stuck to the ends of metal poles. “They want to prepare themselves,” Shamsullah Husseini, a 21-year-old Hazara refugee, tells me when I visit. “They want to be ready for the country that accepts them.”
Continue reading...Police say mobile sirens and surveillance cameras also used to deter crossings into EU
Greece has begun extending a border wall along its frontier with Turkey to deter migrants from trying to enter the European Union, the Greek government has said, after a border standoff earlier this year which has helped drive Greek-Turkish relations to a dangerously low ebb.
A total of 16 miles (26km) of wall will be added to the existing 6 mile fence along the Evros River, which forms much of the Greek-Turkish border, the government spokesperson Stelios Petsas said on Monday.
Continue reading...Home affairs department says 13,171 humanitarian places were given, well below target of 18,750, as applications drop across most visa categories
The home affairs department has reported a significant reduction in the number of visas being granted – including refugee visas, which have been reduced by almost a third – in large part due to the pandemic.
Despite the drop in visa numbers, the department still raised $2.2bn in revenue through applications.
Continue reading...French authorities believe the man may have been trying to get to the Kent coast
The body of a suspected asylum seeker who may have been attempting to reach the Kent coast has been discovered on a beach just outside Calais, according to French authorities.
A dead man, aged between 20 and 40, was reportedly wearing an orange life jacket when he was found on the shores of Sangatte, in northern France, on Sunday morning.
Continue reading...New data reveals significant number of young vulnerable people put at risk of deportation by the Home Office
Kobe was in his final year at primary school when a drug gang recruited him. By then he’d been passed around seven different foster placements and met so many social workers he’d lost track of their names. Aged 17, Kobe was identified by the UK government as a child victim of trafficking.
When Theresa May became prime minister she attempted to make tackling modern slavery a legacy of her premiership. The current government has also been keen to flag its credentials. Earlier this year, the Home Office minister Victoria Atkins stated she was committed to “safeguarding victims of this horrific crime”.
Continue reading...Abd al-Rahman Milad, known as Bija, is suspected of being behind the drowning of dozens of refugees
The UN-backed government in Libya has arrested a coastguard commander alleged to be one of the world’s most ruthless human traffickers.
On Wednesday, authorities in Tripoli said Abd al-Rahman Milad, known as Bija, and suspected of being behind the drowning of dozens of people, has been arrested in the Hay-al-Andalus district of the city and is now being detained by Rada special forces.
Continue reading...Libyan forces holding Italian crew demand release of footballers convicted of people smuggling
At two docks on opposite shores of the Mediterranean, two sets of families have been drawn into a small international crisis as the fate of 12 Italian fishermen held in Libya appears to hinge on that of four Libyan footballers jailed in Italy for people smuggling.
In Mazara del Vallo, in Sicily, family members have been calling for the immediate release of 12 men, part of a crew including six Tunisians, whose vessel was seized on 1 September by Libyan patrol boats accusing them of fishing in territorial waters. They were taken to Benghazi, Libya, where the warlord Gen Khalifa Haftar reportedly ordered them detained unless Italy released the four Libyans whose families claim were wrongly convicted.
Continue reading...Nets could be used to clog propellers and halt boats, says former Royal Marine in charge
The Home Office is considering permitting the use of nets to prevent migrants from crossing the Channel in small boats to the UK to claim asylum, according to a former Royal Marine tasked with preventing the journeys.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, the Home Office’s clandestine channel threat commander, Dan O’Mahoney, said nets could be used to clog propellers and bring boats to a standstill as they attempt the crossing over the Dover Strait.
Continue reading...Exclusive London firm blames recent violent assault on home secretary’s remarks that ‘activist lawyers’ were frustrating the removal of migrants
Britain’s top lawyers have written to Priti Patel to express their concern after a knifeman threatened to kill an immigration solicitor last month in an attack colleagues say was directly motivated by comments made by the home secretary.
On 7 September a man with a large knife entered a London law firm and launched a “violent, racist attack” that injured a staff member before the assailant was overwhelmed.
Continue reading...Reforming the EU’s inhumane refugee policy also means confronting Orbán’s view of Europe as a superior, white Christian club
Fortress Europe is being redesigned – but it is no easy task. European Union home affairs ministers on Thursday began the process of repairing the bloc’s broken migration policy, just weeks after the tragic devastation of the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos. Expect no quick changes, however. The 27 countries are deeply divided over proposals for a new “pact” on asylum and migration.
The European commission’s plan calls for faster pre-entry screening and quick returns of those who fail to quality for asylum. The focus is on ending sometimes deliberately slow, inhumane and inefficient border management procedures, which lead to squalid, overcrowded camps such as Moria, where people can be left in limbo for years. The return of those denied asylum could be managed with a newly appointed “EU returns coordinator”. EU data shows that on average approximately 370,000 applications are rejected each year, but only a third of people are expelled.
Continue reading...Savvas Kourepinis is the captain of the Astral, a humanitarian boat patrolling the Mediterranean Sea to rescue people attempting to cross the main maritime route from north Africa to Europe. For most of this year, the Covid-19 pandemic forced these vital search-and-rescue missions to cease in what is often referred to as the deadliest migration route in the world. As Kourepinis and his crew set out on one of their first patrols since lockdown restrictions eased, they face stringent coronavirus regulations and the reluctance of nearby countries to take in the people the Astral has rescued
Continue reading...More than 7,500 people living in tents on squalid settlement, with two other camps on Lesbos set to close
Thousands of people who fled the fire that destroyed the infamous Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, last month are living in dire and unsanitary conditions in a temporary settlement with little access to water or basic sanitation.
Just over 7,500 people are now living in tents among the rubble and dust of a former shooting range in an informal settlement that has become known as “Moria 2.0”.
Continue reading...Delivering migrants to an offshore location is more about spectacle than solution
Dump them on Ascension Island. Or in Moldova. Imprison them in disused ferries. Build “marine fences” across the Channel. Deploy water cannons to make huge waves to swamp their boats.
And so it goes on. All apparently ideas from Home Office “brainstorming” sessions on how to deal with asylum seekers and cross-Channel undocumented migrants.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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”.
Continue reading...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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