| Two dead and 25 missing after boat capsizes off Libya. The bodies of a woman and a child were retrieved on Sunday off Libya’s coast after a boat carrying some 95 refugees and migrants capsized near the western town of Garaboli, east of the capital, Tripoli. Local fishermen reportedly alerted the Libyan Coast Guard after they found the group clinging to a sinking dinghy that lacked an engine after it was stolen at sea. The coast guard retrieved 73 people, but around 25 others are missing. The survivors were returned to Libya and taken to a detention centre in the Tripoli suburbs. Meanwhile, an Italian naval ship docked in the northern port city of Genoa on Sunday with 100 refugees and migrants who were rescued on Thursday from a dinghy in distress off Libya’s coast. Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Salvini, said they would be transferred to five other EU countries and taken in by the Vatican. Those rescued said they had suffered while being at sea for two days and that some people on the dinghy with them had died. | |
| Doctors call for end to attacks on Syrian hospitals. Dozens of prominent doctors have called for an end to the bombing campaign that has hit more than 20 hospitals in northwest Syria in recent weeks, putting many out of action and leaving millions of people without proper healthcare. Since late April, airstrikes and shelling of opposition-held territory in Idlib province has killed hundreds of civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands more. In the first three weeks of May, the UN recorded almost 270,000 displacements in northern Hama and southern Idlib. Key parts of the healthcare system have also been destroyed, says a letter from doctors around the world published by the Guardian on Sunday. They urged the UN to investigate the targeting of listed hospitals and asked the international community to put pressure on Russia and Syria to stop targeting medical centres. The Syrian government and Russia announced on 22 May the opening of two corridors for civilians to exit the demilitarization zone in Idlib, but the UN’s humanitarian affairs office (OCHA) reports that as of 31 May, the corridors have yet to open. | | |
| UK border authorities intercept eight boats in one day. Britain’s Border Force intercepted 74 people on Saturday, including small children, after eight boats were spotted off the coast of Kent, according to news reports. Another two vessels were intercepted by the French authorities. UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid said the number of migrants crossing the Channel overnight was “ deeply concerning” and that those who chose to make the journey across one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world were “putting their lives in grave danger”. Bridget Chapman, a spokeswoman for the Kent Refugee Action Network, called on the British government to set up an office in France to process people’s asylum applications so they could make the journey safely. | | |
| Rohingya refugees prepare Bangladesh camps for monsoon season. As heavy rain falls in Cox’s Bazar today, and more is predicted in the coming days, DW News reports on the work that Rohingya refugees are carrying out with aid agencies to fortify the hilly, flood-prone terrain where their shelters were hastily built. Working side-by-side with local residents and NGOs, Rohingya refugees have been taking part in projects to build roads, bridges, drainage systems and reinforcement walls and turn hills into graded terraces planted with native vegetation. The projects are providing much needed paid employment for the refugees, who are not permitted to work outside the camps. | | |
| Fear haunts refugees in Sri Lanka in wake of attacks. Around 1,000 refugees and asylum-seekers in Sri Lanka have been sheltering in mosques and outside police stations for the past month since being driven from their homes by members of the local community who accused them of being connected to the 21 April bomb attacks. UNHCR has been working with Sri Lankan authorities to try to move them to safer areas. Around 100 Pakistani and Afghan refugees are still staying in a semi-open car park at Negombo’s police station where they are exposed to heat and mosquitoes. Their children remain out of school. | | |
| Monique Sokhan, UNHCR’s Assistant Representative for Protection in Lebanon, fled from the terror of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s when she was a small child. Many of her family members who stayed behind did not survive. Talking to Melissa Fleming for UNHCR’s Awake at Night podcast series, she said it was an urge to make those loved ones proud of her that drove her to work with refugees. | | |
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