| Aid groups urge Italy to allow 177 refugees and migrants to disembark. The Italian coast guard ship Diciotti was allowed to enter the Sicilian port of Catania on Monday night, but the Italian government has said that it won’t allow the passengers to disembark until it has pledges from other European countries to take them. UNHCR, Médecins Sans Frontières and Save the Children have all appealed to the government to let the migrants off the ship for humanitarian and medical reasons. Those on board, including 34 children, were rescued last week and have already been on the ship for six days. The European Commission said efforts to broker a burden-sharing deal for the Diciotti were ongoing. | | |
| Hungary stops giving food to asylum-seekers in transit zones. Hungarian authorities stopped providing food to several Afghans and Syrians being held in transit zones on the Hungarian-Serbian border after their asylum claims were rejected under new inadmissibility grounds, according to Human Rights Watch. Two Afghan families and a pair of Syrian brothers were reportedly among those denied food after their asylum claims were rejected following July amendments to Hungarian asylum law. Following emergency appeals filed to the European Court of Human Rights by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee , authorities have complied with orders to resume food distribution to a number of the people affected, but HRW warned that dozens of other rejected asylum-seekers may face food deprivation. | | |
| Rohingya refugees mark Eid, one year after crisis began. Nearly one million Rohingya marked Eid-al-Adha in refugee settlements in Bangladesh on Wednesday, almost a year after a brutal crackdown that drove them out of Myanmar in large numbers. AFP reports that prayers were offered in makeshift mosques across the sprawling settlements near Cox’s Bazar, but many refugee families could not afford to purchase cows, goats and sheep to make the traditional Islamic sacrifice known as qurbani. For many refugees here, this is their first Eid-al-Adha since their expulsion from Myanmar, and memories of their homeland overshadowed the festivities. | | |
| Higher Facebook use correlates with anti-refugee attacks in Germany, suggests new research. Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz, researchers at the University of Warwick, scrutinized every anti-refugee attack in Germany, 3,335 in all, over a two-year span. They found that towns where Facebook use was higher than average routinely experienced more attacks on refugees . Experts believe much of the link to violence doesn’t come through overt hate speech, which Facebook has tried to restrict, but through subtler ways the platform distorts users’ perceptions of reality and social norms. | | |
| A new deal for refugees. In this op-ed for the New York Times, Tina Rosenberg writes about the global compact on refugees and the opportunity it offers to address some of the weaknesses in the current system for managing refugee crises, which has put an unfair burden on a small number of poor countries. The compact, which is due to be adopted by the UN General Assembly before the end of this year, will aim to provide more long-term development aid to host countries and to shift away from an emergency response to refugee crises to viewing them as development opportunities. Rosenberg writes that the success of this “new deal”, which is non-binding, will depend on political commitment. | | |
| UNHCR doctor Taimur Hasan recalls finding two malnourished baby girls in a basket that their father carried to Bangladesh after his wife gave birth to twins during their flight from Myanmar. A year after the influx of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar began, Taimur still feels sadness about the situation, but says he is proud to see health services for the refugees running around the clock. | | |
More than 300,000 refugees and asylum-seekers have found jobs in Germany as of May 2018.
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