More than 100 migrants are missing after a shipwreck off the coast of western Libya, the Libyan navy said on Thursday. Rescuers found at least seven survivors on Wednesday after they had remained for three days at sea, navy spokesman Ayub Kassem said, without providing further details. The shipwreck occurred off the town of Sabratha, a hub for illegal migration to Europe that has seen violent clashes between rival armed groups since Sunday.
Last week, Libya's coastguard rescued more...
More than 200,000 Rohingya children, who have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar, are at risk and they need urgent support, UNICEF said Tuesday. “This is a growing humanitarian crisis and children are at the heart of this crisis,” Jean Lieby, chief of Child Protection of UNICEF Bangladesh, said in a news conference at Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar near Myanmar border. According to preliminary data, Lieby said, 60 percent of the refugees are children. “The first thing you see here in different...
Denmark has once again decided not to help refugees seeking shelter. They also refused refugees in need back in 2015. Denmark has decided not to allow any refugees into the country this year under a United Nations program, and they seek flexibility in determining how many may resettle in the future instead of a set quota, the Ministry of Immigration and Integration said, according to Bloomberg. The “more flexible” quota would allow Denmark, and other countries, to reject refugees whenever...
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will ask the European Union to pay €400 million to help Hungary pay for its border protection expenses, including a newly built fence on its border with Serbia, chief of staff János Lázár said Thursday. Speaking at a press conference with government spokesman Zoltán Kovács, Lázár said the EU should pay 50 percent of the €800 million total border protection cost, saying that “European solidarity should also be shown in practise.” Hungary, the minister...
G4S has suspended nine members of staff from an immigration removal centre near Gatwick Airport, following a BBC Panorama undercover investigation. The programme says it has covert footage recorded at Brook House showing officers "mocking, abusing and assaulting" people being held there. It says it has seen "widespread self-harm and attempted suicides" in the centre, and that drug use is "rife".
G4S said it is aware of the claims and "immediately" began an investigation. The security...
Bibikhal Uzbek was 105 years old when she made the journey to the Swedish village of Hova in 2015 from her home in Afghanistan's Kunduz through Iran, Turkey and the Balkans. Weeks from her 107th birthday, she has been told she must go back as the Swedish migration agency has turned down her application for asylum. Their decision means deportation for Uzbek, her son and grandchildren who carried her on their backs during parts of the difficult journey.
"I don't understand, why?" said...
European countries are poised to begin the process of returning refugees to Greece, as migrants seeking reunification with their family members – mostly in Germany – step up protests in Athens. In a move decried by human rights groups, EU states will send back asylum seekers who first sought refuge in Greece, despite the nation being enmeshed in its worst economic crisis in modern times. Germany has made nearly 400 resettlement requests, according to officials in Berlin and sources in Athens...
Police using water cannon and batons have clashed with refugees who had occupied a square in Rome in defiance of an order to leave a building where they had been squatting. Television images from the dawn operation showed people screaming and trying to hit police, who were dressed in riot gear, with sticks. The square, one block from Rome’s main train station, was strewn with mattresses, overturned rubbish bins and broken plastic chairs. Hung on the building was a sheet with writing reading...
French police moved out around 2,000 migrants from a makeshift camp in an area north of Paris on Friday, the 35th evacuation operation in two years in the capital. A similar roundup of the mostly Afghan and African migrants around the Porte de la Chapelle area in July saw 2,800 moved from the streets into temporary accommodation.
The new centrist government under President Emmanuel Macron has promised improved procedures and new resources for genuine asylum seekers, but has warned it...
The Swedish Migration Agency rejected the asylum application and ruled for the deportation of a 106-year-old Afghan woman, who is blind, confined to bed and is believed to be the world's oldest refugee. According to the report of Sweden's public radio broadcaster, the agency denied the asylum request of Bibikhal Uzbek, who has been living in the city of Skaraborg in Western Gothland region for a year. Uzbek has the right to appeal the agency's decision, which said that northern Afghanistan's...
French authorities on Wednesday set up portable toilets and water taps on a road near the northern port of Calais after losing a challenge to a court order to provide sanitation for migrants. Ten portable toilets and a bank of five taps were installed outside a centre run by the charity Secours Catholique a few kilometres (miles) from the centre of the northern port.
Between 450 and 700 migrants are thought to be sleeping rough in the region. Local authorities said more sanitation...
Seventeen undocumented immigrants were discovered on Sunday locked inside a tractor-trailer parked at a truck stop in Edinburg, Texas, according to Edinburg Police Chief David White. Dispatch received a call from someone in Mexico who reported that a relative was trapped inside a trailer parked at a Flying J Travel Plaza, said White. Edinburg is in southern Texas, along the US-Mexico border.
The caller said the relative was accompanied by other immigrants and that it was getting too...
Asylum seekers and other migrants arriving by sea to Spanish shores are held in poor conditions and face obstacles in applying for asylum. They are held for days in dark, dank cells in police stations. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 7,847 people reached Spanish shores between January 1 and July 26, 2017, compared with 2,476 during the same period in 2016. Almost all adults and children traveling with a family member arriving to mainland Spain by boat are...
Some 180 Ethiopian and Somali migrants were forced into rough seas off Yemen by smugglers early Thursday and 55 of them are presumed to have drowned, the U.N. migration agency said.
It was the second such incident in as many days off Shabwa province in southern Yemen, where 50 teenage African migrants were "deliberately drowned" on Wednesday by a smuggler who forced 120 passengers off his boat, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said. "We have seen five bodies and can...
Refugee children could be permanently separated from their families unless the government includes family reunification in post-Brexit immigration law, the head of Unicef UK has warned. The global charity’s UK boss, Mike Penrose, urged the government to commit to including wider family reunification rights in new immigration laws for when the UK leaves the EU.
Refugees currently have the rights to be reunited with extended family members under the EU’s Dublin III regulation. However,...