| Rescue ships remain docked as hundreds die in the Mediterranean. CNN reports that while a total of 218 refugees and migrants are believed to have died in two separate shipwrecks off the Libyan coast on Friday and Sunday, four NGO rescue vessels remain docked in European ports unable to return to sea due to legal restrictions. The NGOs have warned that the death toll is likely to climb further if they are unable to return to open waters soon. As of Tuesday, three NGO-operated rescue ships were detained in Malta pending investigations by the Maltese authorities while the Aquarius, operated by SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières, was docked in Marseilles while its crew took time to “assess the situation”. A graph based on UNHCR and IOM figures, shared on Twitter yesterday by Matteo Villa, a research fellow at the Italian think tank ISPI, showed that in June, almost one in 10 people died or went missing after departing from Libya. | | |
| High school students in Yemen’s Hudaydah flee to capital to sit exams. Fighting in the port city has forced around 2,000 students to brave a dangerous six-hour journey to the capital to sit university entrance exams, reports Reuters. The students are now staying in schools or with friends and relatives in Sana’a while they wait for exams to start. Following a four-day visit to Yemen, UNICEF’s executive director Henrietta Fore said that “in Hudaydah, as in the rest of the country, the need for peace has never been more urgent ”. She said that 5,000 families had fled their homes in the past two weeks and that most shops, restaurants and bakeries in the city were closed with supplies of basic commodities dwindling and prices rising. | | |
| Monsoon rains threaten Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Monsoon rains and strong winds have already affected more than 29,000 refugees living in sprawling settlements in Bangladesh, displacing nearly 2,900, injuring 33 and killing at least one. With more heavy rain forecast in the coming days, these images by Al Jazeera photographer Siegfried Modola show some of the damage already caused by landslides and flooding and the efforts of refugees to prepare for the estimated 2500mm of rain due to fall over the next few months. | | |
| Fleeing new assault, Syrian family doubts they will ever go home. Reuters puts a human face to the more than 270,000 people who have fled fighting in southwest Syria in recent weeks. Mirad Ghabaghbi and his family are among thousands now living in makeshift tents in Quneitra province near Israel. After living in Jordan as refugees since 2012, they returned to their village in Daraa province last year following a de-escalation agreement for the region. Now Ghabaghbi regrets returning and has no idea what the future holds for his family. | | |
| Flawed age assessments leave unaccompanied children in Paris unprotected, claims rights group. In a report released today, Human Rights Watch alleges that child protection authorities in the French capital are using flawed age assessment procedures for unaccompanied children, excluding many of them from care and protection. Based on interviews with 49 unaccompanied children as well as lawyers, NGO staff and government officials, HRW claims that many youths who lack identity documents are denied recognition as children based on appearance alone. As a result, many were considered ineligible for emergency shelter and forced to sleep on the streets. | | |
| Model and former refugee Halima Aden is Teen Vogue’s July cover girl. Last month, the magazine filmed her journey back to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya where she was born and spent the first seven years of her life. She returned to participate in the TEDxKakumaCamp but it was also an opportunity to reflect on her remarkable success and how it was made possible by resettlement to the United States. | | |
By 4 July, nearly 1,400 refugees and migrants had died or gone missing in the Mediterranean in 2018.
| | |
| |
No comments:
Post a Comment