Most people were still asleep on Christmas Day when Ameena landed in England. She remembers stumbling onto the Kent beach in total darkness, retching with sea sickness.
“When I arrived I was vomiting everywhere,” the teenager told the Observer during the first media interview with an unaccompanied child refugee who has entered the UK by boat.
Continue reading...More than 4 million Venezuelans have now fled economic and humanitarian chaos in what the UN’s refugee agency called a “staggering” exodus that has swelled by 1 million people since last November alone.
Related: Venezuela at the crossroads: the who, what and why of the crisis
Continue reading...Home affairs minister to hold high-level meetings and says Australia will help country rebuild after Easter terrorist attacks
The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, will hold high-level meetings in Sri Lanka on Tuesday, with people smuggling at the top of the agenda.
Dutton is due to meet Sri Lanka’s president Maithripala Sirisena, prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his ministerial counterpart in Colombo on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Member states should face punitive action over deaths in Mediterranean, say lawyers
The EU and member states should be prosecuted for the deaths of thousands of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean fleeing Libya, according to a detailed legal submission to the international criminal court (ICC).
The 245-page document calls for punitive action over the EU’s deterrence-based migration policy after 2014, which allegedly “intended to sacrifice the lives of migrants in distress at sea, with the sole objective of dissuading others in similar situation from seeking safe haven in Europe”.
Continue reading...Rwandan community doesn’t want genocide victims’ families living in Australia to experience additional trauma
Celestin Ngoga knows what happens when Rwanda’s traumatic history comes hurtling into the present.
He’s been on European streets with genocide survivors when they encountered their attackers by chance. It can happen in English classes, he says, or on the train, or in shopping centres.
Continue reading...Former prosecutor says US was confident when charges were brought that the two men were part of a Hutu rebel group
The attorney who brought charges against two Rwandan men recently resettled in Australia says the United States was “certain” they were members of a Hutu rebel group that was later designated a terror group by the US government.
The comments again raise questions about how the pair managed to pass Australia’s tough and vigorously applied character and security checks, under which others have been deported for minor offences or historical associations with criminal groups.
Continue reading...‘There never seems to be any consistent rule or fairness,’ specialist migration lawyer
A 28-year veteran of migration law whose Rwandan clients have all been denied Australia’s protection says the resettlement of two members of a violent Hutu rebel group shows a “frustrating” double standard.
Australia’s deal with the US to take in two former members of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, once designated a terrorist group by the US, has prompted consternation among some experts and lawyers. The pair were languishing in US detention after the collapse of a case against them for the slaughter of tourists in Uganda in 1999.
Continue reading...Home Office releases Najat Ibrahim Ismail, an Iraqi Kurd who faced deportation three times
A man who brought his baby niece to the UK from a French refugee camp after she sustained serious burns has been released from detention and reunited with his family.
Najat Ibrahim Ismail, 32, an Iraqi Kurd, faced three attempts by the Home Office to put him on a plane to Iraq in recent weeks. He is married to a British woman, Emma Ismail, and has three young British children, including a 10-year-old son who has autism.
Continue reading...Council of Europe’s damning report says human rights violations must be urgently addressed
Europe’s top human rights watchdog has accused Hungary’s government of violating people’s rights and using anti-migrant rhetoric that fuels “xenophobic attitudes, fear and hatred”.
A damning report from the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatović, concluded: “Human rights violations in Hungary have a negative effect on the whole protection system and the rule of law” and should “be addressed as a matter of urgency”.
Continue reading...Home Office refuses to confirm plans, but campaigners warn Dubs scheme closure would leave minors facing ‘daily risk’ of abuse
The scheme to transfer vulnerable child refugees from France to Britain is being ended, the Guardian has learned, leaving hundreds of lone children facing a “daily risk” of exploitation in Dunkirk and Calais.
Charities in France say they have been told by French authorities that only nine more children, who have already been identified, will be transferred to the UK under the Dubs scheme for unaccompanied child refugees.
Continue reading...In the rarely visited town of Gedeb, fears are rife over state plans to return 150,000 people to areas they fled because of ethnic violence
Last week, a car rolled through the town of Gedeb in southern Ethiopia, flanked by federal police. A local official made an announcement to roughly 150,000 people who, displaced from their homes, have sought sanctuary in makeshift camps in the town and across the surrounding farmland.
In two days’ time, they were told through a loudspeaker, their shelters – mostly built of firewood, banana leaves and the odd tarpaulin sheet – would be demolished. Food aid, medical treatment and other humanitarian assistance would soon stop.
Continue reading...The vessel that became a coffin for hundreds has gone on display at the Venice Biennale. It intends to stir our conscience – but is it a spectacle that exploits disaster?
On the night of 18 April 2015, about 180 kilometres from the Italian island of Lampedusa, a fishing boat capsized with hundreds of migrants on board. Among the waves and beneath the ship’s 23-metre hull, 700 passengers who had dreamed of a better life drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean.
Last week that giant, rusty vessel arrived in Venice on the occasion of the city’s Biennale art festival, where it went on display on Saturday in an installation designed by the artist Christoph Büchel.
Continue reading...Survivors report fishing vessel coming to their rescue 40 miles of coast of Tunisia
As many as 70 people trying to reach Europe from Libya have drowned after their vessel capsized in the deadliest such incident in the Mediterranean since January.
According to survivors, at least 16 of whom were rescued, the boat left Zuwara in Libya, where renewed warfare between rival factions has gripped the capital, Tripoli, in the past five weeks. The vessel capsized 40 miles off the coast of Sfax, south of Tunis, as it headed towards Italy.
Continue reading...Despite clarion calls for Venezuelan ‘freedom’ the US has resisted offering Temporary Protected Status to those fearing persecution
As Venezuela slumps further into crisis, White House officials from Donald Trump down have made repeated expressions of support for the country’s people.
But such comments stand in stark contrast to the meager help the US government is giving Venezuelans seeking refuge in the US.
Continue reading...Plans to relocate Rohingya people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state promise to dash their dreams of returning to traditional life
For the past seven years, Mohammad has been able to see the beach on the outskirts of Sittwe, and the Indian Ocean beyond, only through a barbed wire fence.
“The only difference between a prison and the Rakhine camps is that in prison at least they know how long their sentence is,” says the 23-year-old, shaking his head.
Continue reading...At least two people reportedly killed in shooting at Qasr bin Ghashir facility near Tripoli
Young refugees held in a detention centre in Libya have described being shot at indiscriminately by militias advancing on Tripoli, in an attack that reportedly left at least two people dead and up to 20 injured.
Phone footage smuggled out of the camp and passed to the Guardian highlights the deepening humanitarian crisis in the centres set up to prevent refugees and migrants from making the sea crossing from the north African coast to Europe.
Continue reading...18 April 1934: “Trotsky had not kept his promise to remain neutral when he was granted the hospitality of France,” said the French minister of the Interior
Paris, April, 17.
The French Government, at its meeting to-day, decided to expel Trotsky from France. Commenting on this decision, M. Sarraut, the Minister of the Interior, said that “Trotsky had not kept his promise to remain neutral when he was granted the hospitality of France.” Trotsky, M. Sarraut said, would be asked to leave France (and, in the first place, the Paris district) within the shortest possible time.
Related: From the archive: The expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet party
Continue reading...Fayez al-Sarraj says Khalifa Haftar’s attack on Tripoli ‘will spread its cancer through Mediterranean’
Hundreds of thousands of refugees could flee the fighting caused by Khalifa Haftar’s attempt to seize the Libyan capital, Tripoli, the prime minister of the country’s UN-recognised government has warned.
The warnings by Fayez al-Sarraj – who also claimed Haftar had betrayed the people of Libya – echo those given privately to the Italian government by its intelligence services, and are clearly designed to alert EU states to the possible consequences for European migration of a prolonged civil war in the country.
Continue reading...Long the target of reported abuses, refugees in Libya now claim they are being recruited by militias – a potential war crime
On the roofs of the highest buildings in Tajoura, a military complex and migrant detention centre in southern Tripoli, snipers are taking position.
“Tonight nobody will sleep because of fear,” said a refugee locked up there. “We can hear the sound of guns and explosion of bombs very close to the detention centre.”
Continue reading...Vessel barred from entering Italy or Malta since picking up dozens of refugees on 3 April
Concerns are rising for the wellbeing of 64 people stranded on a migrant rescue vessel in the Mediterranean for a week because neither Italy nor Malta will allow the boat to dock.
The migrants and refugees were rescued from a dinghy off Libya on 3 April by a rescue boat operated by the German NGO Sea-Eye and named Alan Kurdi after the Syrian boy who drowned in 2015.
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