| Horrific conditions for refugees and migrants arriving in Yemen. Despite the ongoing conflict in Yemen, more than 87,000 refugees and migrants arrived there from the Horn of Africa last year. UNHCR warned on Tuesday that they are increasingly met with arrest, detention, abuse and forced removal. Reports of abuse inside detention centres are numerous. A Human Rights Watch report, also released on Tuesday, details abuses carried out by guards at a detention centre in the southern port city of Aden. Former detainees said they were beaten, sexually assaulted and that at least two men were fatally shot. Both UNHCR and HRW said in some cases detainees were handed over to smugglers to forcibly return them across the Gulf of Aden. UNHCR noted that numerous attempts to intervene had been frustrated by “complex structures of responsibility and accountability in Yemen resulting from the ongoing conflict”. | | |
| New arrivals to Greece no longer to be confined to islands. The Greek Council of State, Greece’s supreme administrative court, has annulled a May 2016 decision by the Greek Asylum Service to confine newly arrived asylum-seekers to so-called hotspots on the Aegean islands. Responding to an action brought by an NGO, the Greek Council for Refugees, the court found no reasons of public interest or migration policy to justify the decision, which has led to significant overcrowding and pressure on the islands. The landmark ruling means that new asylum claimants will be free to move to the mainland and to live in any part of the country they choose. However, it will not apply to those who arrived before the ruling. | | |
| Child survivors of Burundi’s civil war become refugees. Reuters reports that among the thousands of Burundians who have fled to neighbouring Rwanda since 2015 are some of the children – now adults – who were helped by the charity, Maison Shalom, during the country’s brutal 12-year civil war . At Mahama camp near Kigali, some of them have reunited with Maggy Barankitse, who ran the charity in Burundi until being forced to flee to Rwanda herself in 2015. Barankitse is now continuing the charity’s work in Rwanda with a restaurant in Kigali that employs refugees and teaches others to cook and a second restaurant due to open at Mahama camp. | | |
| Syria’s public health catastrophe. The Wall Street Journal reports that Syria’s protracted conflict is systematically destroying the country’s health-care system and fuelling a public health crisis. Between the fighting and the damage done to the health-care system, average life expectancy has plummeted. Many perish not from bombs, but because they can’t get medicine or reach a hospital. In the embattled city of Raqqa, just two medical facilities remain to serve a population of 70,000. | | |
| Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Rohingya exodus. Reuters won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on Monday for its “shocking photographs” covering the mass exodus of Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar to Bangladesh last year. For several months, a team of Reuters photographers documented the journeys of the refugees by sea on rickety fishing boats and over land. They also visited the camps where the refugees were attempting to build new lives. | | |
| In a makeshift workshop inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s largest refugee camp, Lusenda, a group of Burundian refugees with disabilities are turning scrap metal into pots, pans and other kitchen utensils to sell at the camp’s bustling market. The workshop was set up by an association of Burundian refugees with disabilities called Dufashanye , meaning “mutual support”. “It’s more difficult for the handicapped to find jobs,” says Mattias Nzorigendere, the association’s president. “But through our association, we have found work.” | | |
In 2010, average life expectancy in Syria was 76 years. By 2015, it had dropped to 56 years, according to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research.
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