‘Largest ever’ aid convoy reaches Syria’s Rukban camp. A convoy of 118 trucks carrying food, medicine, nutritional supplies, and vaccines reached the remote Rukban camp on Syria’s border with Jordan on Wednesday, according to the UN. More than 40,000 displaced people, most of them women and children, are living in the makeshift settlement, where already dire conditions have worsened in recent months due to winter weather and shortages of food and medicine. UNHCR’s representative in Syria, Sajid Malik, said the delivery of aid, the first since November, had happened not a moment too soon, with reports of at least eight young children dying at Rukban in recent weeks. The UN said the aid was “a temporary measure” and that, together with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, it would be carrying out a survey with the camp’s residents to enable them to “decide voluntarily and safely how to return to a normal life in a place of their choosing”. | | |
| Canada to resettle some 750 refugees evacuated from Libya. More than 150 refugees evacuated by UNHCR from detention centres in Libya have been resettled in Canada and another 600 are expected over the next two years, said Canadian Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen on Wednesday. Canada is planning to resettle a further 100 refugees from Niger where the majority of evacuated refugees await resettlement at a transit facility in Niamey. A total of 3,016 refugees have been evacuated from Libya by UNHCR since December 2017. Hussen said Canada was one of the few countries offering to resettle vulnerable refugees directly from Libya. A recent UNHCR report described conditions in Libyan detention centres as “appalling”. | | |
| Nigerian refugees describe fleeing deadly Boko Haram attack. More than 35,000 Nigerians fled a Boko Haram attack on the northeast Nigerian town of Rann at the end of January to neighbouring Cameroon. At least 60 people were killed by the militants. Reuters spoke to some of those who managed to escape and are now sheltering in the Cameroonian village of Goura where even basics such as water and shelter are in short supply. The refugees said they had seen corpses in the streets of Rann and were afraid of returning. Most of the town’s population was made up of people who had already been forced to flee their homes multiple times in recent years. | | |
| Council of Europe Commissioner calls on Italy to uphold human rights of refugees and migrants. In a letter to the Prime Minister of Italy, Giuseppe Conte, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, expressed concern about the implications of Italy’s recently passed international protection, immigration and public security law on the human rights of asylum-seekers and beneficiaries of protection. Mijatović said she regretted “the apparent hastiness” with which people were transferred from the Castelnuovo di Porto reception centre for asylum-seekers near Rome prior to its closure last week, undermining the “significant efforts already invested in their integration”. She also urged the Italian government to ensure that the rights of refugees and migrants rescued at sea were not put at risk by disagreements between EU Member States about disembarkation. | | |
| Need for long-term solution for elephants blocked by Rohingya refugee settlements. The construction of dozens of watch towers and a trained team of 570 Rohingya refugees have helped avoid at least 50 confrontations with elephants at refugee settlements in Bangladesh, but Raquibul Amin, Bangladesh representative for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) told Reuters the elephants needed a longer-term solution . The construction of the settlements has confined about 268 endangered Asian elephants to a shrinking forest area and cut off their migratory corridor to Myanmar. Amin said the elephants need an alternative corridor to move freely to find food, but this could involve having to relocate large numbers of refugees. | | |
| Syrian refugee Tarek was welcomed to Australia last month by a group from Talent Beyond Boundaries – an initiative that connects refugees with international job opportunities. After several years struggling to find legal work in Lebanon, Tarek has been hired as a software engineer by IRESS , a company based in Melbourne. Talent Beyond Boundaries has over 10,000 displaced people registered in its online database. | | |
Just over 55,600 refugees departed to resettlement countries with UNHCR’s assistance in 2018 while nearly 1.2 million refugees were estimated to be in need of resettlement.
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