Outside the Moria refugee camp in Lesbos, a shanty town made of tarpaulin strung between olive trees is getting bigger every week. There are now 18,000 people living in this second camp, designed for just over 2,000.
Ahmed (not his real name), 17, and his friend Musa wind their way up muddy tracks towards their tent, swerving to avoid groups of children running in flip-flops through the dirt.
Continue reading...The moral case for the former Manus island detainee becoming a citizen is as simple as ‘asylum is a human right’
I wonder if it winds up Peter Dutton to know that Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, award-winning author and former Manus Island detainee, is a free man in the continent’s orbit. Boochani, the best-known witness, critic and victim of Australia’s offshore “processing centres”, remains in New Zealand after his 30-day visa came to an end. No one quite knows what the No Friend But the Mountains author is planning next, but it seems safe to assume that sooner or later he’ll lodge an application for asylum in New Zealand. A permanent reminder to Dutton, his predecessors and the country’s immigration detention system that they are not as close to vanishing the “boat people” problem as they might have thought.
For their part New Zealand’s policymakers fear as much with headlines suggesting if Boochani’s hypothetical asylum application is successful it could “fuel tensions with Australia”. The problem is Behrouz Boochani, New Zealander, would enjoy free movement between his new home and his old incarcerators, unless Dutton and the gang insert new exceptions in the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement. This is the “back door” the Coalition government in Canberra is so afraid of, and the political problem preventing Scott Morrison from taking up Jacinda Ardern’s invitation to resettle the last remaining detainees on Manus.
Continue reading...Lawyers warn loss of reunion rights for unaccompanied refugee children will put them in danger
The loss of family reunion rights for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will leave them with “no options” except taking dangerous routes and using smugglers, charities in France and Greece are warning.
The prime minister, Boris Johnson, faced criticism after he told parliament he had dropped a promise to replace the EU law that allows child refugees stranded in Europe to reunite with family members in the UK after Brexit.
Continue reading...While heavy snow makes life unbearable for migrants, a dangerous nightly ‘game’ has led to alleged assault and injury
Photography by Alessio Mamo
In a room in the intensive therapy unit of a hospital in the port city of Rijeka, Croatia, Farouk fights for his life.
The 18-year-old Afghan has life-threatening injuries to his thorax and abdomen. On 16 November, in the woods around Tuhobić, a Croatian police officer shot Farouk – who, with dozens of other migrants, was attempting to cross the border with Slovenia.
Continue reading...When the Observer spoke to people in the besieged city three years ago, they told of their daily struggle. Now they tell their stories of exile
In December 2016, in the eastern half of Aleppo, a brutal siege was drawing to a bloody end. The last bombs were falling on its shattered streets, snipers were picking off their last victims. Besieged civilians, if they still had food, prepared their final meagre meals inside a city they had clung to for four painful years.
Continue reading...Resettlement in the US has allowed some long-persecuted people to flourish, but that doesn’t let Australia off the hook
“To freedom.”
Imran, a 25-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, raises a glass with a big smile. We are in a bustling restaurant on Chicago’s north side. This midwestern city seems a million miles from Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, or the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru, yet it’s now home to several Rohingya men resettled under an agreement between Australia and the US.
Continue reading...EU must share responsibility for influx, says Greece, as it forms controversial plans to build ‘prison’ camps for migrants
Sometimes en masse, sometimes alone they keep on arriving: in rickety boats carrying men, women and children looking for a freedom they hope Europe will offer.
Despite winter’s limited daylight and whiplash-heavy storms and rains, the number of asylum seekers landing on Greek shores shows no sign of abating. Not since Europe’s historic agreement with Turkey to curb migrant flows at the height of Syria’s civil war in March 2016 have arrivals been so high.
Continue reading...Bill will allow refugees from nearby states to become Indian but not if they are Muslims
Indian lawmakers have approved legislation granting citizenship to migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan – but not if they are Muslim. Critics of the government said the legislation undermines the country’s secular constitution, as protests against the law intensified in some parts of the country.
The citizenship amendment bill seeks to grant Indian nationality to Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Parsis and Sikhs who fled the three countries before 2015.
Continue reading...If you drink the water in Ciudad Juárez, there you’ll stay, goes the saying – Se toma agua de Juárez, allí se queda. It’s not a reference to the quality of drinking water (about which polemic abounds because it is so dirty) but to the beguiling lure of this dusty and dangerous yet strong and charismatic city. It’s a dictum that might be applied to the whole 2,000-mile Mexico-US borderland of which Juárez and its sister city on the US side, El Paso, form the fulcrum.
Ten years ago, I returned from several months’ immersion along that frontier, reporting on a narco-cartel war for this newspaper and eventually writing a book, Amexica, about the terrain astride the border, land that has a single identity – that belongs to both countries and yet to neither. A frontier at once porous and harsh: across which communities live and a million people traverse every day, legally, as do hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods annually.
Continue reading...Organisers of competition students travelled to attend demand their return to Nigeria
The organisers of an international student sports competition have called for two Nigerian table tennis players to be returned to their own country after Croatian police wrongly deported them to a Bosnian refugee camp.
Abia Uchenna Alexandro and Eboh Kenneth Chinedu, students at the Federal University of Technology Owerri in Nigeria, arrived in Zagreb on 12 November, on their way to participate in the fifth World InterUniversities Championships, held this year in Pula, Croatia.
Continue reading...Guards detain man who took thousands from migrants before leading them on bogus journey into what they thought was EU
Russian authorities have detained a man who built a fake frontier post in the woods near the country’s border with Finland and promised migrant workers he could smuggle them into the European Union.
The man erected mock border posts and charged four men from south Asia more than $10,000 to take them to EU member Finland, the Russian border guard service said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Exiled Somali Kamil Ahmed says her job at Gargaar FM is more important than ever as the threat of closure hangs over the camp
Sitting in a small shipping container, Kamil Ahmed, 20, prepares to begin her live radio show.
“I feel like the whole community is waiting for me,” the only female reporter at the station says, flicking through her notebook.
Continue reading...Multiple global news organisations call for release of men, who fled their country only to become embroiled in Australia’s detention system
The Senate has passed a motion calling on the government to recognise the increased risk it has placed on two gay Saudi journalists by keeping them in detention after they claimed asylum last month.
Guardian Australia can reveal that multiple news organisations around the world have called for the release of the men, warning the Australian government they are watching the case closely.
Continue reading...Dramatic footage shows the moment a young girl was hauled to safety after a migrant boat capsized in the Mediterranean. The Italian coastguard says it rescued 149 people after the boat ran into trouble a mile off Lampedusa while transporting hundreds of migrants from Libya. At least 20 people are feared dead
Continue reading...Government’s announcement represents blatant disregard for human rights, says IRC
Greece is poised to create “prison” island camps, say aid groups amid growing criticism of government plans to overhaul refugee reception centres on Aegean outposts facing Turkey.
As the UN refugee agency’s top official, Filippo Grandi, prepared this week to fly to Lesbos, where almost 16,000 people are crammed into a single facility, Athens was criticised for adopting legislation in contravention of basic human rights.
Continue reading...Money sent home by relatives working abroad has transformed Kamza over the past decade
Driving out of Albania’s capital, Tirana, into nearby Kamza, blocks of communist-era apartments give way to a chaotic jumble of houses of different colours, shapes and heights. Many are half-finished or being rebuilt. Some are just exposed brick, while others are painted near-fluorescent greens, oranges or yellows.
“People pay a lot of attention to the aesthetics of the houses,” says Njazi Murrja, who lives locally. “They show the culture and the wealth of the family.”
Continue reading...No link found between number of Mediterranean crossings and level of NGO rescue ship activity
No valid statistical link exists between the likelihood that migrants will be rescued at sea and the number of attempted Mediterranean crossings, a study has found. The findings challenge the widespread claim in Europe that NGO search and rescue activity has been a pull factor for migrants.
Fear that the NGOs’ missions attract immigrants has been the basis for measures restricting humanitarian ships including requiring them to sign up to codes of conduct or simply blocking them from leaving port.
Continue reading...After six hellish years inside Australia’s offshore detention regime, Boochani reflects on the country that rejected him, his new-found freedom and the friends he left behind
“One day,” Behrouz Boochani said, observing the bleakness of the abandoned Manus detention centre, its dark form illuminated by wood stripped from the buildings being burned for light, “we will meet in some other place, far away from here.”
That was two years ago, in the middle of a warm November night, when Boochani helped smuggle this reporter into the decommissioned Manus Island detention centre where 400 men were holding out against being forcibly removed: rationing their dwindling supply of food and medicine, guarding against the violent police crackdown they knew was coming, repairing the freshwater wells that had been deliberately spoiled by the retreating guards.
Continue reading...Over 20 years, the debate about freedom of movement has become skewed by a hostile narrative. By Rachel Shabi
Few chance encounters have had a greater political impact than Gordon Brown’s fateful meeting with Gillian Duffy on an April morning in Rochdale in 2010. When the then prime minister was caught on a hot mic calling the Labour-voting pensioner a “bigoted woman” – after she cornered him with complaints about immigrants “flocking” into Britain – it did not just sink his floundering campaign. It set the tone for the way immigration would become the most toxic issue in British politics for the decade to come.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, just 3% of the public cited immigration as a key issue. By the time of the EU referendum in 2016, that figure was 48%. During those intervening years, the issue came to dominate and distort British politics – exactly according to the script established by Bigotgate. Brown’s gaffe both consolidated and gave credence to a political coding that would shape everything that came after: the “hostile environment”, the Windrush scandal, the EU referendum and the revival of Britain’s far right – deploying a narrative in which sneering, out-of-touch, big-city politicians who favour foreigners and open borders are hopelessly oblivious to the struggles and the so-called “legitimate concerns” of ordinary working people (who, in this scenario, are always white).
Continue reading...Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist – a multiple award-winner for documenting life in Australia’s offshore detention system – has left Papua New Guinea
•The story behind Behrouz Boochani’s flight to freedom
Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish Iranian refugee and journalist who became the voice of those incarcerated on Manus Island, has landed in New Zealand and says he will never return to Papua New Guinea or Australia’s immigration regime.
“I will never go back to that place,” he told the Guardian, shortly after leaving PNG. “I just want to be free of the system, of the process. I just want to be somewhere where I am a person, not just a number, not just a label ‘refugee’.”
Continue reading...