Category Archives: Migration

More than 2,000 migrants arrive on Italian island in 24 hours

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Hundreds of asylum seekers forced to sleep outside as Lampedusa reception centre reaches capacity

More than 2,000 people have arrived on Lampedusa in 24 hours as people smugglers took advantage of calm seas to launch at least 20 boats, pushing the reception centre on the tiny Italian island to its limit.

Hundreds of asylum seekers, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and Syria, were forced to sleep on the dock after the centre rapidly surpassed its capacity. Hundreds more were being transferred to an unused passenger ferry offshore for quarantine until they can be tested for Covid-19. Another commercial passenger ship was being dispatched to Lampedusa to take on more.

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Libyan coastguard boat that shot Italian fisher was provided by Rome

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Italian government supplied vessel to help Tripoli control flow of migrants in Mediterranean

An Italian fisher wounded when his trawler was machined-gunned by the Libyan coastguard was fired on from a boat supplied by Italy’s government to help Tripoli control the flow of migrants.

Libyan authorities, who say the coastguard vessel fired warning shots into the air, said three Italian fishing vessels had entered Libyan territorial waters without authorisation before the incident on Thursday, the latest episode in a territorial dispute involving crews from the Sicilian port of Mazara del Vallo who fish for red prawns off the Libyan coast.

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Revealed: 46m displaced people excluded from Covid jab programmes

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WHO review finds many national vaccination plans exclude asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and IDPs

Tens of millions of asylum seekers, migrants, refugees and internally displaced people around the world have been excluded from national Covid-19 vaccination programmes, according to World Health Organization research seen by the Guardian.

The gaps mean that a scattered group numbering at least 46 million people, about the size of the population of Spain, may struggle to get vaccinated even if a global shortage of doses eases.

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‘A scene out of the middle ages’: Dead refugee found surrounded by rats at Greek camp

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Chios case highlights deplorable conditions on islands despite EU allocating millions of euros to improve facilities, aid workers say

At a desolate refugee camp on the Greek island of Chios earlier this week, a young man died alone in a tent. By the time the guards arrived on the scene, about 12 hours after the Somali refugee’s death, the body was surrounded by rodents.

Asylum seekers who had initially alerted staff spoke in horror at seeing rats and mice swarming about.

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Revealed: 2,000 refugee deaths linked to illegal EU pushbacks

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A Guardian analysis finds EU countries used brutal tactics to stop nearly 40,000 asylum seekers crossing borders

EU member states have used illegal operations to push back at least 40,000 asylum seekers from Europe’s borders during the pandemic, methods being linked to the death of more than 2,000 people, the Guardian can reveal.

In one of the biggest mass expulsions in decades, European countries, supported by EU’s border agency Frontex, has systematically pushed back refugees, including children fleeing from wars, in their thousands, using illegal tactics ranging from assault to brutality during detention or transportation.

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More than 100 lone children rescued trying to cross Mediterranean

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Unicef warns many child refugees and migrants picked up off the coast of Libya will be sent to ‘appalling’ detention centres

Fears are rising over the numbers of lone children risking their lives to reach Europe after 114 were pulled from the Mediterranean Sea in one day this week.

The unaccompanied minors were among 125 children rescued off the Libyan coast on Tuesday by the authorities, aid agencies said.

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UK accused of stranding vulnerable refugees after Brexit

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Exclusive: Torture survivors and lone children stuck in Greece and Italy after Home Office ‘deliberately’ ends cooperation on family reunions

The Home Office has been accused of failing to reunite vulnerable refugees who have the right to join family in the UK under EU law, leaving lone children and torture survivors stranded.

The government faced widespread criticism when it announced that family reunion law would no longer apply after the UK left the EU, and it promised that cases under way on that date would be allowed to proceed.

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Identifying Features review – horror and heartbreak in Mexico’s borderlands

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First-time director Fernanda Valadez conjures up a vision of real evil in her story of the terrors faced by migrants into the US

There is unbearable heartbreak in this migrant drama from first-time Mexican film-maker Fernanda Valadez – and also a vision of real evil. At times, it looks something like social-realist folk horror. Mercedes Hernández plays Magdalena, a middle-aged woman from Guanajuato in central Mexico whose teenage son Jesús left home three years before, with a friend, on a bus bound for the border, where he’d hoped to take his chances on disappearing into the US as an illegal. But the body of Jesús’s friend has been found on Mexican territory, in an unspeakably grim holding area where the corpses of teen runaways are routinely kept in container boxes awaiting identification – though there is still no proof that Jesús himself is dead.

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A mayday call, a dash across the Mediterranean … and 130 souls lost at sea

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Last week, a dinghy full of migrants sank near Libya. Those who were part of the rescue mission tell of a needless tragedy

The weather was already turning when the distress call went out. A rubber dinghy with 130 people on board was adrift in the choppy Mediterranean waters.

On the bridge of the Ocean Viking, one of the only remaining NGO rescue boats operational in the Mediterranean, 121 nautical miles west, stood Luisa Albera, staring anxiously at her computer screen and then out at the rising storm and falling light at sea.

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Yemen, Myanmar and George Floyd: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Cambodia to Peru

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Nearly 17 child migrants a day vanished in Europe since 2018

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Investigation finds one in six were solo and under 15, as experts say cross-border cooperation ‘nonexistent’

At least 18,000 unaccompanied child migrants have disappeared after arriving in European countries including Greece, Italy and Germany.

An investigation by the Guardian and the cross-border journalism collective Lost in Europe found that 18,292 unaccompanied child migrants went missing in Europe between January 2018 and December 2020 – equivalent to nearly 17 children a day.

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‘I was alone, I had nothing’: from child refugee to student nurse in Athens

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Ahtisham Khan arrived in Greece, aged 16, after leaving Pakistan. A new initiative is helping children like him find a safe home where they can start to rebuild their lives

At some point in his journey to a freer place, Ahtisham Khan came to a fork in the road. Fifty days of travel from his native Pakistan to the plains of northern Greece had been unexpectedly frightening and exhausting.

“We had a lot of dreams,” he says, recalling why he and his brother, Zeeshan, left their village close to the city of Haripur in Pakistan. “We were teenagers … we didn’t know what we were embarking on. We did what we had to do to survive.”

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‘It’s a day off’: wiretaps show Mediterranean migrants were left to die

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Exclusive: Transcripts of conversations between Italian officials and Libyan coastguard contained in leaked file

At 8.18am on Friday 16 June 2017, the Libyan coastguard Col Massoud Abdalsamad received a long-distance phone call from an Italian coastguard official who told him that 10 migrant dinghies were in distress, many in Libyan territorial waters.

“It’s a day off. It’s a holiday here. But I can try to help,” Abdalsamad told the official. “Perhaps we can be there tomorrow.”

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Mexico’s vow to tighten border fails to deter US-bound migrants

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As the Biden administration enlists its neighbours in attempts to slow the flow of people, families seeking a future free from hunger and violence journey on

Groups of men, women and children stepped off small boats and on to Mexican soil without showing their documents to anyone.

Drivers quickly bundled them into taxis which sped past an immigration office to a nearby crossroad, where the travelers climbed into a vans for the next leg of their journey toward the US border.

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Libya releases man described as one of world’s most wanted human traffickers

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Abd al-Rahman Milad, AKA Bija, is accused by UN of being directly involved in sinking migrant boats

Libyan authorities have released a man described as one of the world’s most wanted human traffickers, who was placed under sanctions by the UN security council for being directly involved in the sinking of migrant boats.

The coastguard commander Abd al-Rahman Milad, known by his alias Bija, is suspected of being part of a criminal network operating in Zawiyah in north-west Libya. He was arrested last October but was freed on Sunday after the military attorney general of Tripoli dropped charges against him “for lack of evidence”.

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‘Kill the bill’ and trans visibility: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A round-up of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to China

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Croatian border police accused of sexually assaulting Afghan migrant

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Asylum seeker says she was threatened at knifepoint in latest in string of reports of violent pushbacks on Bosnia–Croatia border

  • Warning: this article contains graphic details of sexual abuse and violence that some readers may find upsetting

A woman from Afghanistan was allegedly sexually abused, held at knifepoint and forced to strip naked by a Croatian border police officer, during a search of a group of migrants on the border with Bosnia.

The European commission described it as a “serious alleged criminal action’’ and urged the Croatian authorities “to thoroughly investigate all allegations, and follow up with relevant actions”.

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Desperate Burmese refugees flee to Thailand and India to escape crisis

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Tensions rise on borders as thousands seek safe haven from military crackdown

Myanmar’s escalating crisis is spilling across its borders, as thousands of refugees seek safe haven in India and Thailand in the wake of the military coup and bloody crackdowns on anti-coup protesters.

Authorities in both countries have tried to block new arrivals, fearing that a steady flow may become a flood, if unrest spreading through Myanmar worsens. A top UN official warned last week that the country is “on the verge of spiralling into a failed state” if action is not taken soon to stem the bloodshed.

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British aid cuts to leave tens of thousands of Syrians ‘paperless’

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Norwegian Refugee Council says move to pull funding for its legal support programme will leave many in ‘destitution’

Tens of thousands of Syrians will no longer receive legal support, leaving many “in utter destitution” without documents they need to work, travel or return home, after the British government pulled £4m in funding from a charity programme, according to its director.

News of the cut to a Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) project supporting refugees and internally displaced Syrians, comes amid reports of a planned 67% aid reduction in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) budget for Syria, which would place hundreds of thousands of lives at risk.

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Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve spent a year in one place with my mind in two | Chibundu Onuzo

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My family is in Lagos. I’m in London – and there’s no chance of a flight home. Zoom does many things, but it can’t give hugs

It’s been two years since I last saw my father. He lives in Nigeria, just a six-hour flight away, but the last time either of us set foot in an airport was 2019. I don’t miss the cramped seating and recycled oxygen of planes. Nor do I miss the anxious buzz of airports – of standing in my socks on a cold floor, queuing to walk through a metal detector. But I do miss my father and he is at the other end of a plane journey in a world where, for now, the skies are almost empty.

Mostly, I see my father on a screen. His beard is slightly more grizzled but he’s obviously drinking enough water. His skin looks great on camera. I hope the rest of his body is well. Three years ago he was ill and admitted into hospital. We don’t talk about his health but we do talk about Nigeria, about politics and the EndSars protest for example, and whether Nigerians are taking the pandemic seriously enough.

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